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leclairageSo an anon over on CuriousCat a little while ago (come visit me, ask me questions!) asked about any headcanons I wanted to share and any tips I had about characterization. So I wrote a short essay, mostly about Optimus Prime and the different ways I like to write him. Thought I'd put it up here as well!
I feel a bit...weird about giving advice? or talking about my process? Because I still don't feel very experienced as a writer. But it's under the cut if you're interested!
Do I have any headcanons... I was trying to find one in particular to talk about, and what I realized is many of mine contradict each other. (Or they're going into fics that I don't want to spoil.)
And the reason for that is I think of characterization as something malleable. When writing fic, usually you're trying to keep things 'in character,' so that what you're writing matches up with the character archetypes of the source material. To do that you have to figure out which elements of that character are essential or recognizable. But there's always wiggle room to work with.
For example, you might say a key character trait of G1 Optimus Prime is that he's calm and collected. But is he calm and collected because he's a little repressed? Because he knows his troops need calm from him, so he relies on sheer will power? Because he has a deep well of self-confidence and wisdom? Because the power of the Matrix is helping him keep a clear head? Is it a combination of those things? Writing a faultlessly self-confident Optimus Prime is very different from writing an Optimus Prime who is hiding his doubts behind a facade of calm. I generally lean on the 'hiding his doubts' side, but I like a combination.
Once you pick even just one key trait and decide why it's there, a lot of other things fall out from that. If Optimus is holding himself together with will power, superglue, and the Matrix, then he's also a bit lonely, he isn't very open with others, he's reserved. In a story, breaking that facade is a whole character arc. If he's calm because he's faultlessly self-confident, maybe he's also a little arrogant, and breaking that open is a character arc (cough Last Mech Standing cough). And once you add other key traits in, you get a fuller perspective.
And those traits can contradict each other a bit. Like, Optimus is honorable. Optimus cares about others. Optimus loves playing basketball (that's canon!). And all of those are malleable too: what kind of morality/honor does he subscribe to? He's playful, well, why? When? How much? And what might push him to act 'out of character?' Which is so, so much fun to play with. For Optimus, Megatron is a great way to push him to act out of character. And that's canon! Is Optimus Prime the type to resort to low personal insults? No! Unless it's Megatron.
Which is one of my favorite tips—characterization is affected by context. What is your character like talking to their best friend versus talking to their worst enemy? Or their crush? Optimus talking to Ratchet is wildly different from Optimus talking to Megatron, for example.
I feel a bit...weird about giving advice? or talking about my process? Because I still don't feel very experienced as a writer. But it's under the cut if you're interested!
Do I have any headcanons... I was trying to find one in particular to talk about, and what I realized is many of mine contradict each other. (Or they're going into fics that I don't want to spoil.)
And the reason for that is I think of characterization as something malleable. When writing fic, usually you're trying to keep things 'in character,' so that what you're writing matches up with the character archetypes of the source material. To do that you have to figure out which elements of that character are essential or recognizable. But there's always wiggle room to work with.
For example, you might say a key character trait of G1 Optimus Prime is that he's calm and collected. But is he calm and collected because he's a little repressed? Because he knows his troops need calm from him, so he relies on sheer will power? Because he has a deep well of self-confidence and wisdom? Because the power of the Matrix is helping him keep a clear head? Is it a combination of those things? Writing a faultlessly self-confident Optimus Prime is very different from writing an Optimus Prime who is hiding his doubts behind a facade of calm. I generally lean on the 'hiding his doubts' side, but I like a combination.
Once you pick even just one key trait and decide why it's there, a lot of other things fall out from that. If Optimus is holding himself together with will power, superglue, and the Matrix, then he's also a bit lonely, he isn't very open with others, he's reserved. In a story, breaking that facade is a whole character arc. If he's calm because he's faultlessly self-confident, maybe he's also a little arrogant, and breaking that open is a character arc (cough Last Mech Standing cough). And once you add other key traits in, you get a fuller perspective.
And those traits can contradict each other a bit. Like, Optimus is honorable. Optimus cares about others. Optimus loves playing basketball (that's canon!). And all of those are malleable too: what kind of morality/honor does he subscribe to? He's playful, well, why? When? How much? And what might push him to act 'out of character?' Which is so, so much fun to play with. For Optimus, Megatron is a great way to push him to act out of character. And that's canon! Is Optimus Prime the type to resort to low personal insults? No! Unless it's Megatron.
Which is one of my favorite tips—characterization is affected by context. What is your character like talking to their best friend versus talking to their worst enemy? Or their crush? Optimus talking to Ratchet is wildly different from Optimus talking to Megatron, for example.
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Date: 2019-03-12 07:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-13 04:37 pm (UTC)That being said, something about this... doesn't quite sit right with me. Maybe it's just the format but the way you pair up certain traits and behaviours... doesn't feel like it's quite that simple? Like, say, I can see ball-of-anxiety Optimus being just as capable of being a bit of an arrogant prat because he obfuscates his motivations, or professes one set of motivations while holding onto another, more risk-averse one, and Flawlessly Confident Godly Prat Optimus probably spends a lot of time massaging the anxieties of the people around him who aren't as confident, being more confident in assuming risk.
When you're reverse engineering an existing character, applying constraints to your interpretation of them is useful... at first. But I get the feeling that you might sell your own understanding of Optimus a bit short if you think your interpretations "contradict each other", because characters with more than two dimensions by necessity end up with some behaviours that go crosswise to their motivations and principles. If you kind of... take the various aspects of Optimus you describe, I don't get a sense that you're actually looking at different "takes" on the same character, but rather a potentially more full-bodied individual character portrait.
Then again, you only mention G1 Optimus in the post, and I'm just having the worst time trying to delineate for myself when you're talking about his motivations, his self-reflections and his actions, so maybe what I'm perceiving as hedging is actually some combination of trying to delineate G1 OP from the Optimus Archetype combined with me just being bad at reading.
Either way, I enjoyed this :D I'd be interested in hearing you unpack how you write other characters, what you think the key interpretational branches of their character are, and how it informs your character voice for them.
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