Immortal Characters

I find these characters intimidating to write, for obvious reasons. How's thousands of years worth of experience and wisdom supposed to affect someone's personality? I tend to cheat and say they regressed to a more immature state or they just don't follow normal human conventions at all. How do you guys handle them?

edited 22nd Sep '11 9:02:35 PM by Merlo

Once, I had the idea to make it so that time passed differently for immortal characters than for regular ones. So much so that, in fact, characters who were old enough were unable to communicate with anyone below a certain age, since they would be operating on different perceptions of time (consider how elderly people tend to percieve the world moving faster around them as they age; now picture that over a period of thousands of years, and you'll understand what I mean). It was considered the immortal equivalent to dying, actually; the only reason I didn't go through with it was because it interfered with certain plot points, and messed up the motivations of some characters.

Maybe I'll add it again, once I find a way to work around it...

I'm tackling the issue of immortal characters now. The oldest I've introduced so far is 700 and I'm writing him as being rather dismayed at how much the world has changed over the course of his life.

My immortals do have the option of death - they're not invulnerable, they just don't age beyond twenty-something and they heal very well - a number of things can kill them.

I once thought of writing a character who had survived the Big Bang and originated in the previous universe (going with the cyclical-universes branes theory). He was, of course, billions of years old even before the Big Bang, and the next thirteen billion didn't help. I basically had him as an omnipotent transhuman the size of a galaxy who didn't really interact at all, who then created an aspect/avatar that was a normal human who was just insanely smart, badass, powerful, etc. This would probably make for a stupidly impossible plot, since there's quite literally nothing that can challenge this character (he beat the tendency to universal entropy, which is about the most powerful 'villain' imaginable).

Another thought entailed a similar setup, but the character, instead of becoming an omnipotent transhuman intelligence, started going through a loop in a perfectly simulated universe in which he cut off his access to his own memories, then went through a life from childhood in this universe to the age of some million years, then regained all his memories, lived until he got bored, and repeated. It made for a marginally less overpowered character, since instead of just going on and further on until he's omnipotent he's just relived the first million years over and over in different ways, but still a little abstract for most.

...Yes, I'm weird.

In one of my novels, one of the main characters has the qualities of an immortal (when in reality he actually died nearly 1500 years earlier), and he gains an emotional detachment from the world around him and a general respect for mortal lives. His detachment was born from watching generation after generation die off, and so uses it as a defense mechanism. It also, however, gives him an easier time killing whomever for the greater good of the population.

edited 23rd Sep '11 2:12:24 AM by MechaJesus

Well when one of my characters first discovered he was immortal, he abused it. By the very, very, very, very, very, very, very distant future he's gotten so bored that he openly looks for ways to kill himself and on failing that looks for"hobbies" to keep him amused. Like Earth Shattering Laser System Construction. Yeah he builds a fleet of Death Stars.

I tend to think they have trouble with change. I mean have you ever met an older person who doesn't want to do something a newer more poductive way, and instead want to do it they way they have always done it, just because it was the way it was always done.

I treat them as more or less human like everybody else, with a key exception: they don't make mistakes. Everything they do and say serves a purpose; they've gone so far as to deliberately sculpt the way they move to optimize it. To a normal human, they are perfection. This doesn't give them free rein, however; even a perfect person is still no match for a hundred imperfect people.

Their individual backgrounds shape their personalities as normal, they interact with each other and with people in an apparently normal manner for the most part. But they're never sloppy, never unconsidered, even in the grip of homicidal rage. Angering one to the point they would begin to lose their care is a task of years or decades. The only person who's done it so far didn't actually accomplish the task themselves but instead managed to become the external focus for about ten thousand years of self-loathing.

And that didn't help much.

I can agree with that. They would be so practised at all the basic things they do - moving, speaking, fighting - they would not make mistakes. IIRC, Larry Niven theorised along those lines as well and actually had inhuman gracefulness as a revealing trait of people who had lived for centuries.

It would depend. Currently, the only immortal beings I have worked out are Demons/Devils and a group of six entities simply known as The Six. The latter are more powerful, seeing as each represents and embodies some sort of driving force of either the universe or humanity. They're basically stand-ins for deities.

For The Six, it depends on what they embody. The only one that ever really gets major focus and development is Iudicium the Judgment. Also known as Samara Amarante.

For her, I figured that since there is no such thing as Black-and-White Morality, it would make sense that she, being the one who decides the fates of those going to the afterlife, lived among Muggles to know just how they tick. Having been alive for so long and having seen so many atrocities committed over her life, she's developed a bit of a jaded and calm demeanor with Nerves of Steel. However, she isn't completely detached. She understands peoples' emotions and inner motivations quite well, as they factor into her judgment.

In terms of taking direct initiative, she tends to be more of a sidelines type of person, which still factors into the theme of judgment. She can open up possibilities or suggestions to others so they can act on their own decisions. To explain it as a metaphor: she's the referee, not a player.

This is pretty similar for most of my immortal characters, though they tend to have different motivations. She's simply Lawful Neutral because she's supposed to be. This is because I try to avoid immortal characters unless they're some sort of spirit, deity, what have you.

@ Emerald Dragon: Huh, I'd never considered that before.

@ Night: So, the older one is, the better emotional mastery they have? If I'm understanding your post correctly.

Coincidentally, I found this Cracked article on immortality. I don't think I've ever seen the first point addressed before. #2 is interesting too.

edited 23rd Sep '11 7:02:51 PM by Merlo

I just kinda...ignore all implications. Ever.

I once experimented with a whole realm filled with immortals. These people were the ones that created the Earth we live on, but they're far from gods. I imagine them as little children, desperately trying anything to fight boredom. They've found a lot of interesting things to do, most of which aren't even physically possible in our world, not without causing serious damage. They find it hard to make emotional attachments, although if you met them, you would say they were quite friendly. They are people who can do whatever they want since there are literally no long-bearing consequences for their actions. They're the most immature beings you could ever find.

Well, my story Boy Aurus revolves around an immortal boy. He's taken the "act like I look" tack. That and he has an inability to grow so his brain capacity never changes so he basically is incapable of remembering everything he doesn't repeat to keep it fresh in his mind and his never fully developed brain will never develop further. Though sometimes this causes him to act inappropriately because he either doesn't understand the situation well enough to find it frightening or doesn't understand it in a way that makes him terrified.

His existence seems sort of bad, but he doesn't seem to mind most of the time. Aside from the basic creature comforts, he mainly just wants to be cared about, which leads to being very clingy at times because he knows his friend-of-the-moment won't be here forever (but after a few reiterations, he's confident he'll always find another. Though sometimes he will cling to anyone who even exhibits basic human decency). He sometimes ends up trying to self-medicate his loneliness by shopping excessively for clothes to make him look fashionable, rich, and important and eating candy.

He rarely goes into prolonged "Life sucks so hard I barely want to get out of bed" style depression because he is of the opinion that it's better to have fun if even for a few seconds than to not try to be happy at all. He's almost always open to those stupid random diversions. >_> Just because time has a different sense of scale as you get older doesn't mean you'll suddenly become incapable of enjoying simple moments. Five minutes is not a long time to an adult, but that doesn't mean five minutes of messing around is something people would turn down going "BAH! IT'S ONLY FIVE MINUTES OF FUN!" if the other option is wallowing in misery or boredom.

Though I feel like sometimes he comes off like a Stepford Smiler...

There are three immortal characters in my verse:

• William *MacKenzie* Garryson - He had a blessed/cursed with a spell called Invulnerability, which makes him immortal. Period. He was buried in a mine in 18th century in South America, until N and his crew excavated him. He doesn't really care about his former friends or anything and lives as an absolute slacker who prefers to play video games and whathaveyou.

• The Sorceress - She's the first human who had obtained the usage of The Origin so she's more or less a God, but she doesn't like to intefere in mortal affair, even when a group of massively powerful Cosmic Horror beings called The Deviant threatens to end humanity. She likes drinking and making herbal teas and have split herself into many avatars, including a teashop owner and the MC's freeloading grim reaper. She's an EXTREMELY ditzy character who never stayed in one place because, well, she kept forgetting how to return to her place. Rather frustrated with this, she just split herself into avatars and spread them across the world.

• Now, there's Gabriel Rodrick (birth name)/Marcus Albert Devon (Catholic and official name). He's an alchemist who has complete mastery of human body creation and soul transfer, allowing him to make copies of his bodies and prolong his life as much as he wants. To sum, he's a very, VERY, emotionally broken character after witnessing hundreds of thousands of people who mattered to him and care about him died, with many perishing in suffering. Now, while I read that Cracked article that Merlo posted above and while I agreed to the points, I decided to do some experiment with his characterization.

When he was left to die after losing his parents to Black Death at age of three, an alchemist couple rescued him and he spent first three decades of his life as an apprentice/adoptive son to them. It was this period what firmly engraved in Marcus' mind that how wonderful living with people who he care about is. He was therefore devasted when the couple died, refusing the choice to be immortal, and decided that he will give what he was given to as many people as he can. So he chose to live as long as he can, until there's no one in the world who need his help. He also made sure to remember everyone's name, basic outlines of lives, and their sufferings to honor them because he thinks that if there's even one people who remember about them, their lives, the mark that they made in the history of world by their existence, their lives would never lose meanings.

However, as time goes and centuries by centruies past, he realize that there are more and more suffering in the world and less he could do about it. No matter how long it past, seeing people, especially children, suffering from any pain deeply grieved him, but because he knows that being too attached with anyone will deepen the pain, he never involved too much in the history, always preferring to work in side and letting others take credits for his achievements, whether he worked as a teacher or a scientist. Unfortunately, such allowed less power for him to change the world for the better and guilt about not having an active role starts to aggregate along with the memories of his precious people's suffering.

He started to change for the worse, however. As he watched people being sacrificed to stupid and selfish causes, which according to him, includes idealogy, and humanity's inability to learn from its history, his view toward humanity started to become more and more cynical. It was around late 19th century that he decides he should discover the mythical Origin, the very core of reality itself that can be used for absolutely everything including rewriting the world, so he could find the answers to everything, an answer that is so absolute that no one can argue because of its sheer absoluteness. Then came his Start of Darkness.

In 20th century, he was offered a chance to engage on a project to reach The Origin, which he gladly accepted. I want to remind you that the research to reach the Origin is not easy for a rather unnamed scientist like him to perform because it requires a lot of resources and he doesn't like working in goverment so he didn't have so much information about the Origin. It involved human subject experiment, which, despite his growing disdain toward humanity he still objected, ESPECIALLY since the The director however assured that there will be no permanent harm done to the subjects once the experiment is done. Marcus believed him, although not without uncertainty. Then he realized that not only the children were brought in against their will, their mind is permanently broken, with many of them driving themselves to suicide or turn into spawns of Eldritch Abomination.

This broke him. HARD.

Then he went into rampage, killing absolutely everyone who was engaged in the project and went to hiding. He considered offing himself as well, but then every memory of his passed ones converted to massive guilt and self hatred which was so poisonous and strong that it drove him to semi-madness. Then he started to believe that humanity needs to end and kept on his search for The Origin, so he could end the humanity. EVEN THEN, the very first feeling of happiness he had and practiced for centuries lingered and he still kept on saving and improving the lives of everyone who came across his path, although he did it with far more disdain.

His Character Development revolves around him rebuilding faith in humanity and finding courage and self-esteem so he could actively engage in human history, instead of ending it. So basically, he's immortal, but perhaps just as human as mortals, growing from Wide-Eyed Idealist/The Messiah to Nietzsche Wannabe/Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds to finally Knight in Sour Armor.

edited 24th Sep '11 2:03:27 AM by dRoy

i just write them the way i would normally write them.

of course, if something significantly bad happened over a large period of years, such as say, being stuck in a state between life and death and in constant pain throughout all of it for several centuries after being betrayed by their best friend and used a living power source

yeah, i would make their personality account for that. but i dont limit myself to any spectrum of personalities just because these people live a long time.

With my immortals I go with the explanation that since they're not aging, they're not changing very much and thus they have the same basic mindset they did when they were changed and also fixate on certain things like a person or an idea. Great if they were happy when they were made immortal, not so much if they were especially depressed.

I think I also said that their brains were rewired to handle the larger amount of memories since the immortality article brought up that point.

edited 24th Sep '11 12:13:52 PM by Hermiethefrog

That's quite a character arc there, KSPAM.

In my work, there are three or five types of "immortal". Two types are otherworldly and don't often interact with humans directly (deities and the sidhe) and it's questionable how "immortal" they are (it's not like humans are equipped to know). Whatever their life span, they mainly interact with one another and not often with "fleeting mortals".

The other three are/were human. All can be killed, all require the same basics as humans to continue surviving and so can suffocate, freeze, starve or die of thirst. Left alone, they do not age beyond a certain point and will endure indefinitely. They heal quickly and completely and are not affected by diseases and some toxins that can kill humans (other things that are harmless to humans can be toxic to them, however).

There are significant numbers of them and they have means of replenishing their numbers if too many are killed.

They do have extensive dealings with "fleeting mortals" but they also have their own kind to interact with.

So addressing the Cracked article:

5: They are intertwined with the human gene pool - one set of immortals is due to interbreeding between humans and another sort of immortal so newer generations would be genetically compatible. The third kind are humans that have gained immortality. The oldest may become freaks given enough time - if they manage to avoid accidental or violent death long enough for it to matter.

4: Mortals are already aware of them and are well aware of how the immortality works. They are also quite aware of how to become a third type of immortal if they want to take the risk.

3: As their brains regenerate along with the rest of them, things they do over and over tend to stay as memories, things that are obsolete will eventually fade and the neural paths rewritten with newer things.

2: Time passes normally - a day is still 24-hours long. It may well appear shorter in hindsight but there is an upper point beyond which time does not seem to pass any faster in retrospect - primarily because brains don't process extremely large or small numbers very well. They will never view a day as being "merely one quadrillionth of my life", and will basically get to a point where while humans seem lamentably short-lived (but not "fleeting") but also feel "have I really been alive for two thousand years?" Some days it'll seem longer, other days it'll seem shorter.

1: If they're trapped for any significant length of time they will die, just like any mortal would under the same circumstances and for mostly the same reason.

@Merlo: More or less. Physical too; over time they've eliminated not only the bad habits we'd recognize but the bad habits every human is born with because they're human. They don't telegraph motion at all, they don't have tells for when they're bluffing, they can go through a whole fight without ever taking an action that wasn't purely reflexive (with all the extra speed of reaction that grants) because they've just experienced it all hundreds of times.

One of my characters comments on the sheer joy of for once fighting someone who forces her to think rather than merely go through long-memorized motions.

They would be so practised at everything they do regularly that they would probably get into Uncanny Valley territory. They would look and behave mostly human but there would be aspects of their gracefulness, lack of tells and foreshadowing etc that seem "wrong" to mortals. They would have a hard job passing as normal humans unless they dedicated their time to it.

I have a character who is immortal, of the "it's a good thing you can heal" variety. He's been around since ancient egypt and spent his first thousand years or so in a tomb. How did he not go crazy? He did. Then he got bored.

Twenty minutes into the future, he's sane (mostly...). He goes through cycles of apathy and manic struggling to reconnect with reality. He's suicidal but can't die. He tries not to care about people, to make friends or fall in love, but he can't help himself. He's still human (in a way) and he craves relationships with others, but is afraid to lose them. But when he holds back, he misses opportunities for happiness so he dives back in. Over and over and over.

While he has a decent sense of humor, its dampened by the fact that there isn't a lot he hasn't heard a few hundred times before. When he does hear a new joke, or something he hasn't heard before, he laughs extremely hard, and it's very cathartic. People assume that he's insane so often that he doesn't really try to prove them wrong anymore.

He speaks a lot of languages because A) travelling and B) TOOOONS TONS of time, and he's not going to repeat high school over and over, so he's got to occupy his brain somehow

Trying to work one out right now, who's the Big Bad. His immortality is of the purpose-driven kind, due to him being chosen as a prophet by his entire race's god to enact a long-term plan. He's about 1,000 to 1,800 years old, but that's very tentative.

When he first starts off, he has the time of his life. Being the prophet also makes him the king in that culture, so you can imagine him taking life to the max for a few hundred years. He's taken so many wives over the years that it's popular conception he contributed to enough of the nation's descendants to come up with a percentage."

Later on, the deaths of his wives and his children got to him, and he dedicated himself towards pursuing knowledge on his own. He founded pretty much all of the nation's technological advancements and perfected them as far as he could. He spent all that time making sure he was fit too, and is a very skilled warrior. This is me in agreement to the above that all that time means you make less mistakes. Over time, he becomes like a paragon of peak physical and mental excellence.

However, the isolation then proves to much for him, and he knows that while his loved ones will wither away, he cannot resist pushing himself away from them. He starts another family, much smaller this time, and makes the most out of their time with him.

At this point, he's already started questioning his faith and his calling, and has done research into it. This puts him in a conflicted state between his duties and the building info he's been piling up.

My thoughts on Immortal Characters: 1)They're going to act, to a large extent, like a non-immortal version of the character. They no longer feel death, but there's still plenty of pain(including non-physical pain) to worry about. Also, depending on how the immortality works, they may be now vulnerable to several Fate Worse than Death scenarios. 2)I feel that there is a limit on what simple experience(simply doing something, as opposed to actively studying something to understand its fundimentals and build up from their; basicly art vs. science) can give you. 3) After a while, after about a century or so, memory becomes an issue. I don't mean mental degeneration(although if your brand of immortality doesn't protect against that, good luck), but rather just recall issues. I mean how much can you recall from five years ago? Ten? Fifteen? Extrapolate that to centuries, and you see what I mean. Although that could be a Deus ex Machina device: you walk by something and get a flashback, relevant to it, or the current situation.

You know, it's kind of funny that i came across this discussion. For a while now, i've been thinking about a story idea for a show that i like, where a large group of people (7 at the most) are all immortal. They operate as a shadow organization that indulges in all sorts of activities (some legal, some illegal), but even so, each member of the group does still try to pursue a normal life.

I even came up with this idea of how three of the members can blend in better: while their colleagues remain the same age all the time, the aforementioned three have this strange disorder in their immortality. Although they cannot be killed or die of old age, they are still able to age. And just when it looks like they've reached the age where they should pass on, the next day, they awake to find themselves children again.

What do you think?