@oziangels: I think my biggest concern is that I feel there's a lot of pressure Miri is under and it will crack her, sooner rather than later. If she's as distressed as you say by being forced to violence all the time, it should be making things happen. Perhaps driving wedges between her and her friends, or causing her to cling to them. Perhaps making her act in out-of-character, inappropriate ways outside of battle.
Also, there's a tension between her hero syndrome and the hammer forcing her to fight all the time. Sometimes that will mean fights that aren't very heroic at all — sometimes even attacking the people whose side she should be taking? In a way, the hammer is "raping" her — forcing her in ways she's not OK with.
What does she turn to to distract her from these frankly quite horrible things?
A brighter future for a darker age.Man I just keep going back to [[Homestuck]] when referencing characters. (it is obvious that i worship this guy) Terezi Pyrope
, definite heroic sociopath. She has an intense sense of justice and loves scheming the demise of the wicked by manipulating and orchestrating. When we finally get to focus on her introduction, we see her putting her stuffed animals on trial. Eventually she pulls a two-face and flips a coin to determine the stuffed animal's fate, and it lands heads up, but she's blind, so she just says that she can't see the coin and hangs the stuffed thing anyway. Then we zoom out and see about 30 or so hanging stuffed animals from her tree.
She once killed the main protagonist in an alternate timeline, but she felt R 34 LLY R 34 LLY B 4 D about it when one of his friends goes back in time to fix things and tell her to step off. She talks with all caps and with l33t. And she laughs at everything.
She's a psychopath, and I love it.
For the record, Andrew Hussie has one group of 4 interacting with one group of 12 (which is broken up into subgroups of "troll romance"), with time skips to another group of 4, passing references to yet another 4, once had an intermission of 4 vs 15, and has a couple big bads. It is convoluted, and this is before we get into closed time loops and paradox space. The only reason I accept this is because Hussie is completely aware of the convolutedness and jokes about it and trolls his readers with this stuff. And he managed to only make about 5 bleh characters out of all those. Also it's a comedy with a serious storyline, and it whiplashes all the time. But like I said, Hussie likes to troll his readers.
Maybe I will post my Firefly inspired ensemble sometime. I never finished them, and I got as far as the prologue in the story. They don't even have names. (but names are the things I slave over the longest)
edited 16th Nov '10 1:42:51 AM by ch00beh
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." TwitterI present a character, and a rather significant problem I'm having with him. I'm deciding on his name from a few choices, since I didn't like his old one (it no longer fit when I retooled him as The Lancer instead of a villain), so let's go with the placeholder, Mr. Brians, for now.
Age: In his 60s
Occupation: CEO and President of an international conglomerate. Appearance: Not quite seven feet tall, still attractive, Ambiguously Brown (adopted, attempts to find birth parents failed)
Position: Older Sidekick and occasionally The Lancer to the main character, intent upon finding some way to profit from the Magical Land they are exploring, as well as atoning for his previous misdeeds done in the name of... well, seeking profit. Much of his inner conflict comes from balancing these two seemingly incompatible goals.
Brians' entrance sets the tone for his character. The main character is Trapped in Another World, worried that she'll never see Earth again, when Brians shows up in a Black Cloak, which he tosses aside to reveal a jet-black custom tailored suit with a rosy pink tie, hands her a business card, and shows off a device that allows him to freely travel to and from that world and Earth via Portal Network, casually mentioning how much it's saved him on airfare, and how her parents are probably worried about her.
Brians' interests are, first and foremost, money. The land the story takes place in is utterly lacking in natural resources like minerals, metals, or fossil fuels; the only significance it has is that the portals to Earth, an extremely well kept secret, are located on it. Otherwise it's just a backwater the world's empires haven't bothered to conquer because it's not profitable. However, the Portal Network itself is of massive value to him, as well as the flora and fauna, which his Reluctant Mad Scientist dearly wants to study, with the convenient side effect of giving Brians the patents to any interesting chemicals, medicines, or DNA he finds.
Brians is outspoken, unabashedly gay, possessed of incredible ambition and enough willpower to stagger even the main character's Hot-Blooded brother. While others often underestimate him, he's surprisingly strong, even if his Weak, but Skilled bodyguard chides him on being too dependent on sheer strength; he fares poorly against smaller individuals (like said bodyguard) if they have significant experience and/or training in combat, being unable to properly use his strength to his advantage.
He was his father's The Un-Favorite as a child, being an adopted son (his mother's idea), and this drove much of his early life. Coming out of the closet didn't help, either. However, he got along excellently with his grandfather, founder of his the company Brians now leads and a man with a storied past. After Brians' favored brother joined a hippie commune, the grandfather literally beat the father into giving Brians the company. Brians and his father did, however, make peace, though Brians isn't above cynically leaving this fact out to garner sympathy. (He has a Sour Supporter who has prevented him from doing this, however, by mentioning it should he fail to.)
Everyone underestimated him, seeing him as a weakling who'd ruin the family business, a chemical company, and "move to San Francisco, sleep with sailors and start buying dresses to prance around in," as he describes it. The taunting, the slurs, the snickers... all of it whipped him into a frenzy instead. He started thrashing his competition through means fair and foul, investing wildly in young, risky industries (Microsoft is mentioned as one example) and expanding his business into pharmaceuticals and agricultural science. He became the quintessential Corrupt Corporate Executive, because "people don't laugh at you when they're terrified of you."
Ten years before the story's start, in January, day he got together his best scientists and asked them when they could have a new pesticide on the market — he insisted it should be done by March. All of them said "yes, we can have it by March" save for one young scientist who said Brians was a delusional idiot, and they'd be lucky if such a young product was even safe for limited testing by March of the next year. Brians replied the only delusional idiots were the suck-ups who lied to him because they thought he didn't know the science behind his company; the more incompetent half the scientists were fired over the course of the next year, ostensibly for unrelated reasons, and Brians had a new friend in the man who told him the truth rather than lie to sound good.
The young, misanthropic scientist, Dr. Brown (another placeholder name), brought something useful with him. When he decided he trusted Brians enough, he showed him a Lost Invention of Tesla (Brown explicitly mentioning that it deserved capital letters), a device that opened up portals to another world. (How he got it is a long, secret-filled story.) All he wanted was for Brians to fund an expeditions to that world; Dr. Brown would dissect and analyze its native life, and guarantee Brians' company a patent on anything found there. Brians agreed, and when he found out the planet was already claimed by civilizations of Transplanted Humans, decided he smelled opportunity, and started coming along, looking for ways to "sell some glass beads," as he describes it. (Brown doesn't approve, and tells Brians as much, but as long as Brians keeps funding his research...)
By the time the story starts, Brians is an aging (but still capable) man, though he has his share of regrets. He had to step on a lot of heads to get where he is, and has found that it's Lonely at the Top; he has exactly two friends, Dr. Brown and his bodyguard. Despite this, he vehemently denies that Ambition Is Evil, though he usually leaves it to Brown, who was born in genuine poverty, to tell a story about crabs
. But though he won't admit it, he's become something of The Atoner, hoping to make up for his previous dark deeds.
Now, the reason I've bothered you people with all this. It's because I have a problem: I mentioned earlier he was gay. As a villain, he was a straight Handsome Lech making passes at the female main character; making him gay for his retool as an Anti-Hero was for several reasons. First, it was to minimize subtext between him and the main character, as well as to give them a commonality (the main character isn't straight either). As a side-effect, it works as a catalyst to his pre-story "Well Done, Son" Guy characterization. I like the dynamics it creates, but it still feels a tad tacked on. I'm thinking I could give him some subtle Camp Gay mannerisms, which could actually mix well with his Large Ham attitude, but I'm dipping my toes in some Unfortunate Implications there. Then again, Straight Gay has its own problems, and actually giving him a romantic partner is out of the question because it weakens the essential Lonely at the Top characterization that drives him. So, what to do about this potentially messy bit of characterization?
edited 16th Nov '10 11:09:59 AM by KillerClowns
@Clown: This is the one time in the thread that I didn't actually feel like the gayness was tacked on. I don't think it should be the sole driving factor of his ambition, but it could be like the straw that broke the camel's back.
On the subject of a gay lover, maybe the guy just goes to brothels or something.
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." TwitterHehehe. Kate has all the best lines
I wonder if she ever smiles? I'd have to say no.
You certainly nailed her character.
That last picture of Veritas scares me, because I can't tell if it's taken out of context or not. Is she doing what I think she's doing with that butter knife? O.O
Lastly... Why is the picture of Jess marked as mature? o.O
Overall, though- excellent pictures. They're awesome, hehehe...
ch00beh- Man, what does it for you to see a character as gay?
Later today, I'll post one of my other characters. She's gay, but it's more of a Situational Sexuality type thing. You'll see. I'm looking for a way for this to seem more natural, though, since she's a pretty important character in one of my stories. So there you go, you'll hve a chance to rip her gayness to shreds.
Also, I'm starting work on Kate and Veritas' story today. Does anybody want to see a scene with them?
There are too many toasters in my chimney!Just in case someone got offended by swastikas.
And the butter knife thing is really just a joke. To explain the joke: .
edited 16th Nov '10 1:11:52 PM by MrAHR
Read my stories!Years of tearing down what the media has built up, probably.
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Twitter@Morven During the story, she does crack a few times. And by the end, she's pretty much a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds. She was already a bit unstable mentally before the story, so, she and her friends aren't the best Chosen Ones. And, yeah, some of the battles she has aren't particularly heroic. She tries helping people all the time to make up for when she’s forced to fight and prove (to herself, mostly) that she isn’t a monster. Part of her is genuinely worried that the hammer isn’t really making her violent but that she’s already like that. Unfortunately, she's stuck in a Crapsaccharine World full of citizens, who don't either don't care or don't want her help. So she stops helping people after awhile and becomes more reckless and bitter, constantly snapping at people, especially her friends.
Hmm, none of them have much to distract them. It's pretty much, "Here's a mission. Now go intercept these soldiers, oh and you have to do this now." The man they're stuck working for bounces between being somewhat nice to them and being downright selfish and using them for his own gain. He doesn't really care about vacation days. Originally, I had them going back and forth between this world, which I'm still thinking of a name for, and Earth but I dropped it because I thought the story was getting too muddled. But I should do something about that, they need some sort of distraction.
Honestly, I feel bad for her. I'm looking over my basic plan for my story and, Mira gets the most crap dumped on her. I mean, it isn't a very happy story, so all the characters have horrible things happen to them. Everything just seems to affect her more. So I'm thinking of toning it down a bit, because, at this rate, she'll kill herself halfway through.
Although... nah, I couldn't.
Im with a little doubt here, having good physique (albeit small frame) and good smarts automatically make one a Marty Stu?
No, competence at both does not equate to Mary Sue / Marty Stu.
However, too much competence can make a story boring if the challenges aren't up to the task. Also, it's generally better to spread abilities around enough so the protagonist can't win on his own.
Frequently the protagonist is fairly good at both in certain types of stories. In military sci-fi, for instance, the protagonist is frequently a young officer who's good in a fight and with decent strategic sense - but they're inexperienced, short of resources, and are lacking crucial information.
edited 16th Nov '10 8:50:25 PM by Morven
A brighter future for a darker age.Here's a question for you, that I'm struggling with;
How do you challenge a reality warper, without resorting to bringing in another Reality Warper?
There are too many toasters in my chimney!Well, she's a character who is able to bend reality. Not really warp it.
She can, for instance, destroy a cannonbll that's thrown at her, just by bending reality in several directions at once around it, tearing it to small pieces.
She was created specifically as a weapon against all the characters who are flinging around super-strong magics... But as of now, the only way I've thought of being able to defeat her involves sniping her off with a bullet, because she can only destroy something moving at slow speeds.. And it's just cheap to only be able to challenge a character in one way.
Also, mages are unable to kill her by asploding her head.
So... Now, I'm at a loss as to how to challenge her. But removing any of these powers would require me to rewrite several mmajor parts of the plot. But I don't want to have a God-Mode Sue on my hands... But I don't want to rewrite... God Mode... rewrite...
Looks like a rewrite's inevitable.
edited 16th Nov '10 9:04:41 PM by CyganAngel
There are too many toasters in my chimney!

Vry whiplashey.
There are too many toasters in my chimney!