Need Character Design Symbolism

See, one of my embryonic villain ideas is a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds video game programmer who uses a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game she designed as a focus for a bit of Post Modern Magic. While she initially comes off as an ally, after The Heavy gets killed, she reveals she really wants to use the symbolism of a fantastic, virtual, and fair world as a focus for a grand Assimilation Plot, effectively transplanting the real world for her virtual one, which in her estimation everyone will be happy in.

While she's confined to the text world, the idea is that the final battle takes place within a bit of her world that's already supplanted the normal reality, where she reformats herself as a boss character to defend the core server.

The symbolism I'm going for is the idea is that she's essentially drawing the design of her new character out of her subconscious, and thus it reflects her subconscious self-image; one part A God Am I (as the creator of the new world), one part her inability to connect with anyone on a personal level in real world identity, and three parts her fear and unwillingness to deal with the real world any longer, to the point where she can't comprehend why anyone would prefer horrible, cruel, and unfair reality over her virtual one. With a lot of thematics from the game itself, of course. EDIT: Which is primarily Medieval Cosmology (four worlds apart from Earth; the Fariy Realm of Stories, the Magic Realm of Platonic Forms, and Heaven and Hell) and {{Theosophy}}, actually-she's built a mythology in game where the various root races are the other Player races, though she's quietly extracted the racist overtones of the whole thing-one of the things she hates about the real world is prejudice-not realizing she hard-coded attribute differences into every race that makes them good or bad at certain professions).

Which is where I'm stumped, I don't see how that would translate into a visual medium, or a concise description of a visual medium. I am going for Light Is Not Good (her game is a kind of Heaven, after all) and "cosmic egg" (isolation), but apart from that...little help?

edited 10th Apr '15 9:38:13 PM by Leliel

I'll be back tomorrow, this requires thought deeper than I'm currently capable of.

In what you've written or conceived so far about this character's life and history, are there any motifs that you've noticed? Some reoccurring symbol of something ordinary that has gained symbolic meaning with the characters' experience? Subconscious might be less archetypal and more individual/personal.

The idea that as the real her, she's nothing and no one. The fact that life dealt her a crap hand, a fact that only becomes obvious if you do a double check. She ends up as the workhorse of any group she joins, because she blindly follows the leader no matter her misgivings (well up until her Freak Out at any rate)

I think a big thing with her is that she's ultimately afraid of agency, because on some level she's terrified of growing up. All she sees of the adult world is a bunch of trials and problems, and she's convinced she can't face them at all; not after what she's been through. Pretty much everything she's known is the fact that the strong hurt and dominate the weak, and that's even seeped into her paradise (see Experience Levels), it's just that the weak can become the strong in her world.

edited 10th Apr '15 9:58:24 PM by Leliel

I was thinking something along the lines of like, The Moth Diaries which is called so because the main character is grieving the death of her father from suicide, and her favourite memory of them was the night they saw a beautiful species of moth and so she wondered why that wasn't enough for him if life brought people visuals and experiences like that. Her father was a writer, too, and she a diarist, so then the notebook motif came in.

The motif for that was moths and notebooks.

A lot of other examples come from Shin Megami Tensei: Persona. In the video game version, the Ojou character had this palaces-and-princess theme in her subconscious world, and a caged songbird that I (as the gameplayer) just sort of rolled with. In the anime version they elaborated so that she used to actually have a pet bird, which, in my opinion, was laying on the symbolism a bit thick, but to reverse engineer that could be what you're looking for. The others are of the same pattern that I think you've got now with isolation/immaturity=egg: macho gangster struggling with his homosexuality has the motif of roses, the has-been pop idol struggling to return to a normal life has a motif of satellites, and the child prodigy who is considered a brain first and a human being second has robots…

edited 10th Apr '15 10:28:44 PM by Faemonic