Pyromancer with a fiery personality.

Hello everyone! New to this forum, although I'm visiting tv tropes for years.

I'm here to ask you a question. How much of a cliche is the Pyromancer who everyone says needs to control her anger? My money is on very much. But I can't help it. I want a pyromancer chick who needs to control her emotions because otherwise she would be dangerous.

So how do I make her less of a walking cliche?

edit: additional things. She doesn't have to be a jerk, or someone with anger management issues. But she will have to keep herself in check to not blow up everything and some times other people think she is not careful enough.

(Hell, I do hope I posted on the right sub-forum)

edited 9th Jun '15 9:34:31 AM by DDentonas

Instead making it Personality Powers, make it that she had very, very, very good reasons why she had that personality. Admittedly, this is done so many times on those Jerkass Woobie/ Broken Bird, but you can always play with it. Besides, just because it's rather cliche that doesn't mean it couldn't be done well.

Well, I know that cliches are not bad. But will the readers know it as well? Or will they read in the description that there is a fiery pyromancer and assume that this will be like every other fantasy novel out there and close the book?

I'd say if you want her having difficulty with her emotions in a non-cliche way, have her be very bad at managing stress. Either she's quick to yell/throw things/burninate because she just finds it the easiest solution, or she has a habit of burning herself out because she can't manage her time properly or she takes on too much stuff.

HAVE YOU ALREADY...

(*capslock*)

Sorry. Have you already decided upon the character's age? If she's young and in high-stress situations, it might be enough to justify her responses as a natural reaction.

Ha. I remember a time when I exploded in class once, and for the rest of the school year everyone kept telling me to control myself, calm down, it's not worth it, [insert useless phrase here]. That could happen here? She might actually be reasonably well-adjusted and have a stable personality (no depression, no borderline, no sociopathy, etc.), but because she has freakin' "burn you with my brain" powers, everyone assumes that she automatically has a "fiery personality"... and so she acts the part to live up to expectations. (This doesn't sound so bad? Imagine the people around you expecting you to be angry all the time, and then acting terrified when you aren't because that means - for example - you've been pushed too far or have found an "outlet" for your rage. For your own sanity, you'd start acting based on how people expect you to.)

If what you want is that she needs to keep a tab on herself to avoid blowing everything up, you could make her clumsy instead. Specifics depends on how her pyromancy works, but she'd need to stay focused at all time to stave off Power Incontinence. If she looks like she's letting herself be distracted, people around her will recoil in apprehension... might even try to snap her out of it, spook her and make things worse. Just ideas.

You still have the "must stay in control" element, but you can dodge the eye-rolling cliché that way.

Those are all nice ideas. I think I'll do a combination of the last two! She will be a reasonable person with a stable personality, but people are going to assume that she can't control herself because they see her not being able to control her power very well. And well, she will get tired of saying "Really, I'm cool. No, I'm not in denial. Will you stop saying that?" and will be kinda pissed!

Of course, you could also change her powers, make her freeze things instead, and she's so afraid of her own power, oh wait....

You could make it to where you need to be at least a little angry to control fire. As in, they feel the fire within them. Your pyromancer uses it so much that they can no longer really turn it off.

Something you could do is tie fire into emotions in general, and change the color of the fire to different emotions; red fire for anger, blue for sorrow, green for contempt, etc.

You could also have your character a generally happy person, then becomes the "fiery" pyromancer when ticked off (depending on the situation, that could be commonplace or infrequent).

Maybe she is a "fiery" pyromancer, but it's not anger that sets her off, but strong emotions in general, or some other emotion in particular.

Unless you're going into indie publishing, that won't be up to you. You can want to lead with everything unique about your story and hide the fiery pyromancer, but marketers will play it safe and put on the blurb what every other fantasy novel out there is saying on the blurb.

If you are the one leading with the Fiery Pyromancer, then your target audience is people who love hot-tempered magical arsonists as much as you do.

If you don't want to make her a cool-headed pyromancer or a time-pauser with a fiery personality, then as said upthread make the fire powers coincidental to a short temper that has believable causes and even some difficult consequences to contend with.

edited 5th Jul '15 3:12:29 AM by Faemonic