#amongsus

hi there, thanks for the ask.

i have a couple of tutorials on character design, but they are fairly broad, because it’s a broad area of study, and that’s only for the visuals. i’m not sure how good my tips would be, but i can try to spitball.

1) my biggest tip would be don’t write the characters like people. writing characters like people makes you less interested in real people and misses the point of why you’re making the character (at least for me, but i’m fairly utilitarian about it). when my characters seem to have a lot of depth, it’s because i write them in a way that mimics the experience of learning about another person, not making them like a real person. when you or your audience members know real people, they don’t know Everything about them, only little chunks. you only really know yourself wholly, and even that you don’t think about all the time, but in little disparate chunks. people direct their lives with purpose, even if that purpose is having no purpose, so characters exist with purpose as well. my brain desires “realistic” in some form, so this is how i’ve rationalized not wasting all my time building useless, sometimes confusing lore.

2) i usually reduce characters down to little clusters of internal values or beliefs they have. the beliefs don’t have to be related, and they don’t even have to agree with each other; lots of people are hypocrites, and values tend to be somewhat contextual. along with that i pick a default affect or mood they have as a person. together, these things form the base of pretty much any character i make, whether they have just one line or appearance or they are protagonists carrying dozens of pages of story about their inner lives. protagonists get more values, but every one i write tends to have at least 2 beliefs plus a default mood. for me, this makes characters a little easier to work with. creating them with beliefs in mind first makes their place in the rhetoric of the narrative easy to figure out. they don’t really come out and say it most of the time in the stories because like who does that irl during casual interactions lmao, and the relationship between the beliefs can mean more than the beliefs themselves to me, but they can affect how the character is written drastically.

3) almost every character falls into at least one archetype/trope and that’s okay. i used to be really embarrassed and averse to the idea that my writing had Tropes. tropes are how people rationalize and make sense of the world through their understanding of media, and it can be directly related to the values that the character uses to understand the world as well. a lot of the time when i choose a second value for a small role, it’s a direct reaction to knowing what kind of tropes they fall into.

4) i've been trying to structure depth with characters in a kind of cause and effect format to try to cut down on (inevitably conflicting) information about characters: fact, explanation, reference. it’s kind of like present, past, future in terms of the narrative... the character does something, there is an explanation (frequently not in the canon itself), then something happens which references the explanation rather than the action the character did later. this creates a sense of depth and grandiose scale outside the scope of the narrative, especially if you connect references to two explanations, etc. while the explanation would also be factual, i call the actual canonical content “fact” because the explanations are frequently subcanonical/not stated, meaning i can tweak them later if i don’t like them... i also wanted to mention that because even though it isn’t 100% pertinent to CREATING a character, it demonstrates that i tend to not work from backstory to final product with characters. i decide what i want them to do or be first, then work through an explanation for why (obvi this all happens before i’m like, literally publishing them).

It’s YOU

YOU are SUS. Sorry :/

Painted this on stream, make sure to follow me there to catch my artwork early: https://www.twitch.tv/blinkence