#team-sieben

None of these. I would be a traveling minstrel. You give me a gold piece, I sing you a funny song, and you feel better for a few hours, which is nice, but the experience isn't very emotionally rewarding. (It's not even like I'm particularly talented at my job – it's just that there aren't many other opportunities available to someone with a voice like mine.)

If the queen is a doll, which is controlled by her puppet master, then how does this involve any magic? For that matter, if she is literally made of wood or something, why is she a queen in the first place? Is it a tradition that the queen is controlled by her puppet master? But, more importantly, it sounds like your magic system would require a lot of handwaving, and not just because of the literal chains – for example, she has no agency, so if her puppet master were to order her to do something, say tell a lie, how would she do it? Without any control, she would presumably keep making wooden-doll-y moves.

This kind of "robotic" character sounds like it could be a good plot device, in that it has an intuitive "real world" parallel that makes it easy to think about. A puppet master and a puppet is a really common story element in children's fiction. So it's easy to imagine how this character would work and behave, in contrast to something that has no real world analogue. But when you try to do something more complex with the character, and start thinking about how you would actually make her a doll, you run up against some really interesting questions and now you're a little lost. There's a difference between "fictional character -> straightforwardly imaginable consequences" and "fictional character -> tractable problems." When you can't handle a character in your head, it's because there's a limit to the meaningful ways you can draw on your knowledge of the real world to imagine how the character would work. This doesn't mean the character is bad, just that you need to figure out some handwavey thing to let it be "real."

A similar problem occurs with people who are "in love," or people who have "sex." I notice that fiction is sometimes ambiguous about whether a character who says "I love you" means they actually love the other character, or whether it's a figure of speech or a lie or whatever, but I don't see people asking these questions about saying things like "I am in love." We understand enough about the concept of love that we can tell when somebody is saying "I love you" because they really do love the other person (or think they do) without trying to handwave away the logic of the statement. This doesn't mean that one can do without any handwaving or anything – there's a lot one has to simply stipulate about a character's thoughts and feelings, and I don't think this is a problem – but at least we have a working assumption that love is not a meaningless concept. By contrast, I think a lot of fiction isn't sure how to write about "sex." Many stories have characters having sex, but few explain how or why they have sex, or how much they enjoy it.

Why is sex so hard to write about? The answer seems to me to be that while we understand love (at least at a certain level of abstraction), we don't understand sex, not in a way that would allow us to be confident about what a fictional character saying "I am in love" would mean. Sex doesn't have the same kinds of folk theories that love does. After all, if you don't know anyone who is in love, the most you can do is check whether the people you know who claim to be in love are acting . . . lovey, I guess? But sex has a totally different conceptual background. There is nothing particularly silly, or "ugly," about having a conversation about sex with a friend, but something tells us we're not doing the same thing as when we have a conversation about love. We don't really have a schema for what kinds of things can be said about sex, or what kinds of things one can think about sex. So a sex scene in fiction just . . . is. It doesn't necessarily feel right or wrong, it just is, and if you ask yourself why a character does this or that it can become very hard to answer.

Vriska was my favorite character in Homestuck for a long time.

The main thing that had me rooting for her was the way she reminded me of myself. There's this kind of kid I remember seeing a lot in (online) social groups, who is extremely nerdy and hates getting pushed around and mocked and bullied, but who also is really hateful to other people and (when given power) tends to abuse that power for personal gain and entertainment. Basically, they remind me of the worst aspects of myself.

I was always hating these characters, but then when I started reading Homestuck and saw the first appearance of Vriska, the narration presented this character as a fantastic badass and I thought, "oh, okay, this is my kind of character." Every time Vriska got mocked or defeated, I was cheering her on. She was "the girl I wanted to be when I grew up," as it were (and given the utopian nature of the comic's world I could imagine one day growing up to be literally exactly like her).

In later acts, though, Vriska became less like me and more like the "worst aspects of myself" that I'd loathed when embodied in other people. She still had some of the cute/funny combo-nerd/manipulator aspects to her, but those came to seem almost like a facade. She was still my "kind of character," but she went way, way off the rails in terms of how she changed the game, and, well, that wasn't so much fun.