character building

Convallaria majalis // Lily of the Valley

Have a chart I developed for visualizing the disposition of your character! This is partly inspired by a chart I saw of Aristotle’s Golden Mean, which is a system he had for developing good character, but of course, this is more about gauging a character’s traits than bringing them into any kind of balance.

Asian American women and stereotyping/microaggressions

I’m second-gen, but here are some you might want to consider:

people assuming she’s foreign (“your English is really good!” “so when did you come to the United States?”)

identity policing (e.g. saying she’s not really East Asian because she was raised in the US)

having her surname constantly messed up, either written or spoken

others attributing her intelligence to her race and/or calling her a “bad Asian” when she does a less-than-perfect job on something

being mistaken for another East Asian colleague/classmate when they look nothing alike

having white people (friends, colleagues, superiors) dismissing her anger at racist actions as ‘overreacting’ and telling her to get over it

being called “exotic” or being exoticized by potential suitors

There’s probably more, of course, but those are some I’ve had to deal with as a Chinese American lady.

So in my English class we’ve been talking about the different elements of different parts of a story. My professor referred to the elements of characterization as bones. I don’t know why, but that’s just what he did. 

He’s talked about these 5 “bones” a few times already and actually uses them to talk about characters in readings we’re doing along with our usual workshops.  He says if you can get these bones out of a character then it’s a well built character. So don’t take these lightly as figuring these 5 bones out for your character will make writing your story much easier.

Desire: There are two types: Long and short. Essentially it’s what do they want in 5 years and what do they want tomorrow? Think of desire as their goals, both long term and short term.

Strength: This is their ability. How do they handle stress and other emotions? What makes them strong? 

Weakness: What makes them hide in fear? What will they run away from?

Deals: Also referred to as “Alway’s and Never’s”. What will they always do? What will they never do? (I’m sure there is more to this, but my notes are hard to follow.XD)

Action: What are they doing? This is also relevant to your plot.

The last thing in my notes that I have written is this: Characters come to us already formed.

Now that’s a weird thought because there’s tons of character development stuff out there as we always see making a new character as a hard task that takes forever. Except that isn’t how it works and having the above said to me actually made everything easier.

Monte Carlo seen from Roquebrune   -   Claude Monet   1884

French 1840-1926

I had a pretty fucking miserable day, internet. I’m not gonna go into it, but as you can probably guess, it had to do with how fat people are treated, in public, by strangers.

Right now I’m making cookies for a work function, which means a lot of downtime. So I’m going to kill some of that waiting by writing this quick Tumblr post which I hope, in fact, will channel some of my combination of white-hot fury and soul-destroying hurt into a useful end.

So, without further ado:

1.) The Fat Character That Isn’t A Unicorn

Have you ever noticed that when a fat character appears in something, there’s only ever one of them? Of course, this is an artifact of our current thinking about characters that are not cisgender white heterosexual body normative abled people: their defining character trait is their difference. So there’s one fat character, and their character is being fat.

How about you have… two? Or ten? Actually you COULD make it so that the body types represented in your cast of characters isn’t a strict binary between “pitiable fat unicorn” and “sea of muscle toned gym bunnies.” There’s a range of what is considered “fat bodies,” after all, and in fact we treat that range differently in an intersectional way (e.g. accounting for gender, ethnicity, class, etc.)

2.) The Fat Fashionista

Have you ever noticed that most fat characters come in two flavors of costuming? There’s “dowdy plainclothes meant to hide their body shape” and “clearly ill-fitting or poorly chosen clothes mean to amplify the strangeness of their bodies.” It kinda sucks, esp. since finding good, enjoyable-to-wear clothes that fit and look good is a challenge for many big folks.

So here’s a thought: how about you make a fat character who is an utter fashion plate? And I don’t mean “fat person who dresses too extravagantly and thus comes off as delusional/incompetent when it comes to their appearance.” I mean make the character who’s at the bleeding edge of style in whatever it is you’re making, a fat character. Maybe they learned to become an amazing clothes maker themselves because of how biased fashion is toward very thin bodies. Metacommentary!

3.) The Fat Acrobat

When I talk about fat characters in stuff, particularly video games, people often ask me about Street Fighter 4′s Rufus. My answer is always more complicated than people looking for an “oh yeah he’s good! You have permission to like him!” want.

I don’t dislike Rufus entirely. My favorite thing about him is his fighting style. He’s a kung fu practitioner and his style is really acrobatic, flashy, and swift. This is not a way fat bodies are typically rendered in fictional combat, where their usual modus operandi is Sumo Sumo Sumo, or Bearhug, or I Sit On You And Hurts, a trope I want to fuck off directly into the sun at speed.

How about you make your fat brawler character the speed character? Make them nimble and graceful rather than lumbering and “powerful” (which is often code for “unintellectual / thoughtless”). If you’re working in a fantasy or fictional setting, this is easy as hell to explain, and you have literally no excuse when fools whine “that’s not realistic!”

Counterargument: Sammo Hung. Have a nice day.

4.) The Fat Heartthrob

Western culture asks fat bodies to be desexualized and asks fat people to desexualize themselves (through “modesty” etc). You’ll notice that the “fat person who has the gall to make sexual advances / have sexual desires” trope in media almost always centers on their apparent delusional inability to process that they’re Not Supposed To Do That.

What if the popular character in the thing you’re writing, the one who has all the girls/boys/enbys/GQs desiring/lusting after them, is fat? You don’t even have to go to the creepy extent of “they’re chasers!” or whatever. They don’t need to be admired FOR being fat. They just need to be desirable. People can find them hot. Maybe they’re the most wanted prom date. Maybe the princess from Planet Zebulon that the Galactic Star Hegemony has invaded to kidnap is a pretty big girl.

Maybe you don’t play any of this for laughs or set the desirable character up for a fall and just let people be into them. Bonus points if they get to score with someone by the end of the story, if that’s an appropriate story beat for your narrative.

5.) The Fat Person Who’s Okay And Who People Are Okay With

I feel like options 1-4 are a pretty low bar, though they do seem a little geared toward various fictional permutations. But if you feel like you just can’t bring yourself to try one of them, here’s my final suggestion:

Make a fat character who’s basically okay in life. They’re healthy, they’re happy. People like and respect them. They just happen to be fat. They’re not defined by a diet, or the abuse of others. This doesn’t mean you don’t mention it, ever. But it just becomes one of a range of details about that person, not their whole self.

So, there you go. Five easy ideas. And when I say easy, here is what I mean: you can just do these. You don’t have to explain to anyone why you’re doing them. You don’t get to hide behind “It doesn’t make sense!” as a reason to maintain a harmful status quo. You, the creator, the person with the power, can just do this.

spider people are cute, fashionable, and fun to design.