What's the worst thing you've ever done to a character?

I don't.

Gonna have to agree with that.

Well, the worst thing I do to Anhelia is bring her back. Dying, well — she looked for that, anyway, of her own. It's my choice to have her brought back, into a semblance of crippled life. The cruelest thing you can do to a Death Seeker is to ruin the death they tried for so hard, is it not?

Worse, for one so strong to be reduced to that weakness; the blue ichor flows but sluggishly where hot blood once surged, and the processes of unlife are so much less potent than those of life. Many pleasures are stolen from her thereby; from the basic ones such as eating and drinking for pleasure as well as sustenance, to many other things one could count as "joy of life".

Worse; I bring her back without those she journeyed with, her soldiers; without me, she would have sat with them in the great halls of After, and known pleasure.

I'm a malevolent creator, as my entry on here said.

Being In New Dawn Is Suffering.

Hmm, to define worst thing in regards to the weird things my characters go through...

I've had one girl lose her hand and foot in a fight and receive a rather nasty beating before her inner demon popped out to cause massive property damage. Then again, I've had the spirits of colorful Pegasus ponies torn out of their bodies to be torn apart by malevolent magic so the shattered souls could be turned into colors for rainbow production. And then there's the hell of that one planet where female characters just can't catch a break and in the end the bad guy gets away only to end up in a place of razor toothed, reptilian gals who rip him a new one. XD.

@Feo: yeah... what I've just described is probably the only thing that I actually feel bad about doing to my characters.

The CDT crew would probably know which one is mine... or one of the worst. I have so many it's difficult to pick.

edited 25th Oct '11 10:25:24 PM by PsychoFreaX

Huh, I guess it depends on your perspective. I'm not sure which of the following three is worse:

• Erasing the mind of a good chunk of the people you care about, one by one, at random intervals over your life, and in one particularly egregious case, doing so in a way that forces you to look at the perfectly preserved body of your love interest every day Your mind is ultimately erased as well, prompting The Reveal that the process is instantaneous from the outside, but from the inside is most definitively not.
• Seeing your entire mode of life about to collapse with good odds that you're about to be a victimized class (we don't see the outcome, the story ends before the events have time to actually play out).
• Being Mind Raped into becoming a villain, being blinked in and out of existence repeatedly, being subject to infinite pain, and then forgetting about the second and third things through Laser-Guided Amnesia.
• Being granted omnipotence by an unseen force merely to demonstrate what a pathetic person you are, and then, solely because of your own flaws, destroying your life and concept of self, culminating in simultaneous suicide and Mind Raping yourself into thinking you're a normal person.

Well, in my God of War II script fiction, there was this OC film director named Joe who was filming a movie about Prometheus. Kratos manages to kill Prometheus quite quickly and turn his body into ash, and he managed to convince Joe to try snorting lines of it. It burned every last inch of skin off of him, leaving him as a living skeleton who has to follow Kratos around. The kicker? Kratos got powers from doing the same thing.

So far, he has:

• had his legs broken, causing him to ride around with Kratos in a backpack
• been gagged so he couldn't tell anyone about Kratos' Prometheus misadventure
• had his body dropkicked into a swamp
• been turned to stone, and promptly shattered
• had his head used as a projectile weapon
• been fried, feathered and served to Euryale as a distraction (implied)
• had his bones crushed to make Atlas' bread
• had his leg jammed up someone's nose (his legs got fixed))

And on top of that, his family have also been turned into skeletons by Kratos, in a misguided attempt to "make things right".

I wasn't expecting people to go into quite this much detail. I feel less afraid to go into detail now. (If we're called sickos, we'll be called sickos together!)

One of the settings I'm currently writing short stories for has a sort of Hell, but only the most horribly evil people go there automatically. They themselves choose a limited number of dead people to serve them, and they must pick from people who have guilt in their hearts. The thing is, guilt isn't the same thing as sin, and since Evil Is Petty, you'd better not have any guilt if you die after pissing off an evil person. (The capper here is a sexually abused girl who blames herself both for the abuse, and for her abuser's accidental death, and serves [not to mention services] her abuser in Hell after her own suicide several years later.)

Then again, the fact that this version of Hell isn't eternal means that I've still lost to some of the other posters in this thread.

Oh, this is a contest?

... I got nothing.

I did some thinking though, so here's something tangentially related: My stuff is less about the violence and more about the psychological. I guess extreme deaths don't really appeal to me, because unless the character comes back as a ghost or something there isn't room for character development. It seems like a sensationalist, shock factor thing.

Then I guess the real worst thing I've done to a character is strip away his dignity, figuratively emasculate him, and the rest of his life is utterly mundane and boring. The point is that there's literally nothing he can do other than accept the rather permanent situation and move on.

The worst thing I have ever done to a character is not writing his story.

Think about that for a moment.

& Excellent.

I don't know.

If someone never existed, can you really hurt them? At what point do they actually exist, anyways? We like to say it's when we come up with them, but really that's more related to conception than birth, and then we start making abortion or miscarriage parallels and it all gets sort of bizarre.

I was sort of taking it as consciously creating a character and then explicitly doing nothing with them, suspending them in a kind of narrative limbo, which, if you read AHR's post...

Possible.

On the other hand, being the author, unless you actually write about them needing to scream it can be argued they're in a stasis so profound that time literally does not pass for them, since at any moment you can pick them up and nothing has changed, and no time has passed.

...it's hard to torture somebody with neglect when they don't actually need much.

edited 26th Oct '11 12:56:08 PM by Night

JHM: Actually, there is a video game like that, of Suda variety...hang on...

—puts out the Cakman signal—

Good point. But in either case, there is the potential existential argument related to Medium Awareness...

Does he defend the streets of Gotham from bad meta? I know not. Still intrigued.

edited 26th Oct '11 1:00:08 PM by JHM

I don't know if we should count meta.

I mean if we counted meta suffering, I have been using only a very limited number of character archetypes that I've been using again and again, so it's kind of like I've revived the character again and again just to cause them new suffering.

Oh, AHR is talking about Contact in the end of the game, it is implied that every time you turned off the game, the professor was simply inside the game, conscious, waiting for you to come back and help release him from imprisonment. After the letter in which he tells you this finishes, you are left with the screen of an empty room, with none of the characters in it, and no way to go to the main menu or pause screen. You can only turn the game off.

We're talking about a slightly different sense of metafiction here.

Unless we aren't. So confusing.

Jeez.

edited 26th Oct '11 1:07:30 PM by JHM

I guess it could be, depending on whose death we're talking about. In the case of my writing projects, extreme deaths are more about justice and audience catharsis than shock factor.

As for the worst thing I've done to a character, though... I'd have to say, although I write some very extreme death scenes, that the things the characters live to tell about are even worse. In the Lovecraft Lite Fantastic Noir story I'm writing (think Italian guys with Tommy guns fighting Humanoid Abominations, with some Ninja Pirate Robot Zombie thrown in on the side for good measure), one of those Humanoid Abomination characters has the ability to inflict massive amounts of Mind Rape on any cast member who isn't already insane (there's one guy who was already Axe-Crazy to start with, and this appears to give him immunity to her powers). She possesses one of the female protagonists and has her rampage through the party's camp with a gun, eventually maneuvering her into a position where the man she loves has to be the one to put a bullet in her head. Forcing a guy to kill the woman he loves is definitely the worst thing I've done to a character.

edited 27th Oct '11 10:53:35 AM by EnemyMayan

edited 21st Jun '17 5:22:58 AM by ArlaGrey

Well, I've done a lot of terrible things over the years, but for some reason I consider this the worst:

I gave a character bi-polar disorder paired with schizophrenia that manifests in auditory and very minor visual delusions. He has a family which, though small, loves him and makes up for the fact he has no friends. Then he meets a woman. She doesn't make all his problems go away, but she's understanding and she helps and she makes him happy. They get married, they have kids whom he loves and then the dam breaks.

His third child is born and suddenly his manic depression is back, the delusions are worse then ever. His wife spends all her time worrying, his daughter starts having nightmares, his son is scared of him and his wife is scared to let him hold the baby.

Seven months after the baby is born, his wife is out of the house. He murders his kids (drowns them). He dries them off, tucks them all in, and reports himself to the authorities. He's immediately sentenced to hang, but backlog means he has to wait seven months. He does, and none of his family ever visit him, he doesn't even get any letters. And because he murdered his own children he gets constantly harassed by the guards and the other inmates, and eventually has to be isolated from everyone.

And I haven't even found a suitable name for the poor bastard yet - though he is a major character in my Na No Wri Mo novel.

On the subject of deaths not allowing further character developments-that's why I use them to wrap up a character's arc.