What’s your favorite aspect of writing each member of the floor squad?
Unrelated to the q but I do love how often "floof squad" gets misspelled/autocorrected to "floor squad" like yea by the time I'm done with them they usually are
KENDAL: In the strangest possible way, always one step ahead of everyone else. Kendal routinely makes decisions before anyone else has even realizes a choice can be made. This frequently leads to him surprising me, and that's such a wonderful gift when I've been rolling around these plots for so long in the polishing process that they're starting to feel monotonous.
ALINUA: So conflicted! She's boundlessly compassionate, but she always has to wrestle her self-preservation instincts out of the way first. Her power is vast, but all she wants to do is make herself small. She wants freedom, but can't stop tethering herself to people. She has not processed a single trauma in her life and I love her so much
ERIN: UNABASHED SELF PITY AND ANGST. Everyone else can compartmentalize when the going gets rough, but Erin always has time to make it all about him. He is a Tragic Hero and his life is Very Hard and if nobody else is brave enough to throw a full tantrum I can always rely on him to fail to bottle that shit up
FALST: Like Erin, Falst is very good at finding reasons to hate himself. Unlike Erin, Falst would rather die than share them with the class. Falst will push himself to his own breaking point and beyond and all I need to do is keep giving him reasons to. Falst makes suffering look easy.
DAINIX: EMOTIONAL! INTELLIGENCE!! Dainix knows how people are feeling and is smart enough to sometimes even figure out why. He also starts to explode if he bottles up his own feelings, so he's an emotional open book and he's self-aware enough to not turn himself into a powderkeg if he can help it. Also, Dainix is very good at a very specific set of things that are designed to work in a context he can no longer be in. He's very knowledgeable in very specific areas, but he's having to figure out how to apply what he can do to the new, confusing, very big world he's been cast out into. He is also the only Mostly Normal Mortal with no damage reduction or healing magic, which gives me, the writer, lots of fun things I can do to him that wouldn't be threatening to anyone else.
TESS: The only character who does not take the story entirely seriously. She's not dumb or a jokester or a bathos machine, she's just a lot more untouchable than most - fully armored, magically empowered, capable of yeeting herself out of almost any bad situation - so she's cavalier about things that are deadly serious to everyone else. This makes Tess a Silly Character, which means when I give her something to get serious about, it hits a lot harder. Tess is basically one of those Food-Fighting-Friendship shonen protagonists who doesn't pay attention to anything outside of that venn diagram. A lot of things just roll off of her. But not everything.
turnnoffyourmind
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