dost thou have any tips for writing Daniil and Artemy? I’ve been struggling with them for so long and it’s making me procrastinate
I’m deeply flattered you think I know what I’m doing when I write them LMAOOO
Character dynamics have always been my favorite thing in the world so I’ll just list out the basic things I do when writing any character.
Before going in I ask myself two things about the character I’m writing. 1. Who are they? And 2. How do they hide it?
Every character has a personality, and with Pathologic characters in particular, one of the core tenants is that nobody is a reliable narrator. They each have a front they put up that is different to their true desires and intents. This is especially true of the healers (whom we see in different lights in each route in p1)
So for Daniil, he puts on this front of being very uppity and uncaring and logical, but he’s actually a deeply emotional character, driven by his feelings a lot of the time. He completely breaks down at the end of Bachelor route to the point of wanting to destroy the whole town because he feels so alone and betrayed. He is NOT a ruthless logical super doctor
Artemy, on the other hand, is a lot more bonkers than people give him credit for. Like even in p2 where he’s much softer there is definitely the remaining hints still (see his dialouge with grief if you choose to take organs from his man instead of saving him on day 1). Artemy is very driven by a sense of love and duty, but he’s also heavily desensitized to violence and in p1, it’s the solution much of his dialouge initially goes for. You can see in changeling route that he just fully goes in to it and spends most of the 12 days trying (and failing) to kill Daniil. That kind of contrast is, I find, much more compelling to write into his character than just a kind and good kind of dad type of guy.
I hope this helps at least somewhat, but really, I don’t know what I’m doing I just write things lol
