i have blorbos

there's certainly something about a character that sticks to a very rigid moral code explicitly because they tried doing whatever makes sense at the time and it went horribly, horribly wrong, and so they have lost their trust in their own ability to tell right from wrong and have a genuine desire to not hurt people that they don't know how to live up to without effectively outsourcing their morality to something or someone else. and then the something else fails, because of course it does.

i like characters who feel like nothing. they have no desires or needs, trust them on that. they just want to help others and do nothing for themself. i like characters who are very convinced that they are nothing, inferior, worse compared to the people around them. i like characters who have decided the best thing they can do for others is to give away everything they have and save nothing for themself. characters who have very little autonomy, characters who try to have no personal opinions. characters that are totally fine with being smothered and talked over. characters that look to others for decisions, characters that need others to tell them what to do. as long as other people are happy, you know?

sometimes it's important to injure the character

ttrpg games are insane and make you insane in ways that are fundamental and irreparable. sometimes the best piece of fiction you will ever experience will happen to you and your friends over two to five years of your life. it will be your work and their work and yet somehow exist between and beyond you all. there will only be like three or five of you in the room and nobody else will ever be able to experience this in the way you did. it will be ephemeral and immediate and it will occasionally make you feel so bad you see hell. fuck. what a concept

big fan of when you peel back all layers of a character and at the bottom of it there's love

why are they doing this? because they loved someone so much it caused the plot to happen. Grief counts btw

ESPECIALLY a big fan of when this isn't enough to make them a good person

and punishments. more punishments. surely that will help

i like a character who follows all of the rules their whole life and then ends up with big fucking nothing except their own self righteous #coping because the rules arent actually good for them or for anybody else

big fan of when a character metaphorically sweeps something under the rug, but you can feel them flinch every time they walk over it and feel the crumbs beneath their feet

love when an absolute nightmare of a character is introduced and all you can think is "jesus christ buddy what the hell is your problem" and the narrative gives you a hot minute to stew before explaining Exactly what is Their Problem. and you just sorta sit back in your metaphorical rocking chair and think "huh. yeah okay fair. that would do this to a person, yes."

not an apologizer but a contextualizer. yes the character did that but please understand the Circumstance. yes they had other options but they had to make this choice in a sea of available bad choices. and also it made the narrative more interesting. won't anybody think about the narrative!!!!!