Thematic Cast Building

Do you have a group of characters build on specific motifs, like tweleve characters who each embodies Zodiac sign and such?

In my biggest writing project, there are ten most important characters and each of them are based on Sephirot. As I planned so far, their journeys as characters are follow each enumerations and by the end, they all achieve their individual aspect.

Maybe a bad idea, maybe not. -shrugs- Depnds on how I write it, obviously.

I can't say I do for certain. If I am it's unintentional.

I wasn't really being intentional initially. Then one day I was doing some reading into Sephirot and things kinda matched up so...

One of my novels contains Biblical angels and demons who are contracted to humans with similar dispositions.

It's happened occasionally, but not really.

I've always wanted to do this but it never worked out that way.

I think I've only done this once; I took three existing characters and slotted them into a Fire, Ice, Lightning triad of blind mages. It's been scrapped, but I can't say I'd do it again or craft characters directly into a theme.

In an older story of mine I retroactively applied the Seven Deadly Sins to my cast of villains upon realizing that it fit in rather nicely, but I have yet to go in and purposely do it from the start...

I rarely, if ever, do things solely for out of universe reasons, which includes "thematic" setups. So, no.

Once I decide on the theme of the story, I sometimes end up having characters, both main and minor, reflect different takes on that theme. I think many stories do that.

That sounds more like the kind of thing that you're supposed to do with a story's theme- have your characters tie into it.

It's assembling characters to fit with Meaningful Name-esque schemes that doesn't make much sense to me.

edited 8th Jan '12 5:10:24 PM by CrystalGlacia

That's how I feel (although the OP isn't limiting this to Meaningful Names). It's one thing to use characters to show the theme, but assembling entire ensembles to fit some theme is too Doylist a way of doing things for me.

Although this can be plausible when done in-universe, as with a number of superhero stories.

I understand what you meant - I was just pointing out that the OP wasn't just talking about names, in case that got brought up.

edited 8th Jan '12 5:34:49 PM by nrjxll

Oh, oops; I mean the kinds of themes seen in Theme Naming. Like basing a cast off of religious figures.

I make a token effort to fit characters to some sort of pattern, but I don't despair if no pattern quite fits them. (For instance, a story that was planned to have characters representing body, mind, soul, and memory has two representatives of mind and none of soul, but they're very different takes on what mind means, and the representative of memory is close enough to soul that she can do double-duty for it.)

I have sometimes done things like this, but "how" tends to be a complex question. The symbolism that I use in my writing, where it occurs, tends to be woven deep into the fabric of the tale and is generally fairly arcane to whit; obvious comparisons, outside of the realms of irony or the absurd, tend not to be my cup of tea. So things get odd quickly. Very odd, very quickly.

I prefer themes in my stories. Themes in my casts tend to make them look unrealistic.