Breaking characters?

[NightSister]

[member="Kana Truden"] I wasn't going to reply... but then I tried to look at your bio. *shakes head*

theory: You can always tell female writers since they're much more likely to break their characters.

Guilty as charged. Didn't realise it was considered a female thing, though it does sort of make sense.

[member="Saint Monica"] that's a good point actually. Thanks a bunch. Same goes to all of you.

 

[Kana Truden]

[member="Aria Vale"]
:roll:

In short, Kana has seen too much. Back when I started in 2014 the Republic was still very much starting (or continuing, depending on who you ask) its decline. Invasion after invasion was lost and in the middle of all that I placed Kana who gradually grew more worried for her own psyche as the burden of defeat kept growing. With time she eventually settled down as a Healer and began to create a new life for herself without violence and death.

Only, the violence sought her out with a skirmish that ended up killing all the people that lived in the Enclave that she was in charge of. Everyone she cared for died and she cracked, became disillusioned with the Jedi and shortly after that had a brief (unplanned and poorly executed on my behalf) phase during which she turned to the dark side. She came back again, got herself reacquainted with some long lost friends, but yet even then in the end they left her too. Corvus Raaf, left her without notice, much like Kian Karr and her old apprentice Seraphina. All that Kana had known in the Jedi Order was effectively gone, or dead, and she cracked once again, turned cold and uncaring in the face of death.

She is so used to loss and death that she tells herself she no longer cares about it.

I think that about sums it up.

Kaili's trauma is far simpler. The only real difference being that she is aware that it was her fault that everyone around her had died. Ship crash mixed with giant insects preying on the survivors. Her friend bled out in her arms. She never really got over that and still hasn't. It happened nearly a year ago (IRL) soon.

EDIT:

What I am trying to say is, drag it out. Enjoy the trauma.

 

[Veino Garn]

Only, the violence sought her out with a skirmish that ended up killing all the people that lived in the Enclave that she was in charge of. Everyone she cared for died and she cracked, became disillusioned with the Jedi and shortly after that had a brief (unplanned and poorly executed on my behalf) phase during which she turned to the dark side. She came back again, got herself reacquainted with some long lost friends, but yet even then in the end they left her too. Corvus Raaf, left her without notice, much like Kian Karr and her old apprentice Seraphina. All that Kana had known in the Jedi Order was effectively gone, or dead, and she cracked once again, turned cold and uncaring in the face of death.

Oh, those were the days, weren't they?

Anyways, [member="Saint Monica"] makes a really good point. Being a Jedi is an extremely difficult path to walk. That was why the Order put such an emphasis on the Code and its centralized structure. It was a groundwork and an anchor for these individuals who suddenly found themselves with great power and great expectations to fulfill the great responsibility it entails. Acting as an individual, it's exceptionally difficult, but with the Order as a whole, it's easier to bear that burden. On Chaos, it's actually probably more difficult because we essentially condense everything in canon together all at the same time and the stakes are at a higher normative level. That's enough to break people.

It's what happened to Veino until he started dying and coming back. He originally started as a knight errant, traveling the galaxy and helping people out of compassion and empathy. But then the One Sith Wars started and he moved to that, feeling it was how he could best serve the people of the galaxy, but he lost his heart in the process, operating out of grim determination and what should be done. What had truly made him Veino was lost in the flame until the invasion of... Lujo, if I remember right.

He lost his way and suffered because of it- all through his own decisions and choices made for good reasons and eventually he sacrificed himself to find himself again. I think that's part of what happens when Jedi are broken. Like Yoda said about the Clone Wars, they lose sight of who they are and who they are meant to be. Once that happens, anything can happen and it's not easy to find their way back.

 

[Ellie Mors]

There is one thing I would like to see: a writer that can properly write that one character that goes to great lengths to avoid being broken,

One would think that a character that can make their attempts at avoiding breaking make sense would be most likely to succeed if they have a very good knowledge of themselves and especially their limitations. And the limitations of their actions. Good self-awareness is not the same as running away from themselves or other manifestations of fear, and that's another trap bad writers fall into.

If you can give birth to a stillborn and feel nothing from it, you are more heartless and evil than I.

You don't grow something inside of you, carry it for several months, and then suddenly have it die only to just pass it off as a fact of life. You don't just shrug that off and get over it. That stays with you forever. No amount of careful planning can have you avoid things like that.

 

[James Justice]

[member="Aria Vale"]

James here gets broken like every Monday. Believe it or not he started out as a really good guy then---crap happened to him. He kept getting up and pushing back, just carrying a little more baggage each time. Now I think the best I can describe him as is "holding the pieces together as best he can." What has broken him is actually mostly what PCs have done to him--with the exception of what the shaddow NPC we call the Prosector has done to him.
Here his wife Died. Here he was captured and tortured (the first time). Those are just two if you want more, I'd be glad to give them.

EDIT: no idea what happened I wasn't done with my post and it just posted on me.... weird.

Mystique, another of my alts, started out broken, then she got fixed up, then she was broken again even worse. Her love proposed and died in the same post (A player Character) and that set her off. She developed two split personalities, one who kills and the other who is soft and broken.

Loss, be it a relationship, is the most common way. But you have so much more. In psychology we deem that loss happens when your framework that you view the world with is broken, or alternately your emotional regulators are overwhelmed and boom you find yourself in a world you thought was different. There is a necessity for shifting--either you find out that the world isn't what you thought it was, you weren't who you thought you were, or those you love most aren't what you believed. You feel like you lose a part of you and grieving is inevitable. A sense of violation is common--something sacred or important to you is no longer the way it was before.

If you want someone to write this storyline with you, I'd be honored to write it with you

 

[Dunames Lopez]

Have any of you forgotten about the question of species? What can break a character from a given species may not break a character from another species, and vice-versa.

There are certain things that will be handled differently depending on the species of the characters. A personal bankruptcy would be a good way to break Hutts, Muuns or Neimoidians, but would not break non-aristocratic Geonosians, no more than it would break orthodox Jedi (almost irrespective of species, so long as said species can actually produce orthodox Jedi).

Then again, I'm not the sort of writer that gets their characters into trouble or breaks them unless absolutely necessary. Dunames is the closest I've ever got to an unbreakable character, sure she suffered some setbacks but never to the extent of bringing her to a breaking point.

 

[Kurayami Bloodborn]

Bankruptcy isn't really a thing on Chaos unless you impose it upon yourself. And no the question of species isn't as relevant as you make it out to be. Sure it may be more difficult to break a character that is disconnected from others emotionally, especially if that character is also resistant to mental alteration through the Force. And that is true of any species with resistances to certain things. However, it can still be done given that an individual will place their own value on what is important to them. So even if it were more challenging to do so through specific means it is always a possibility that it could happen as long as there is evolution of the character and what they deem important to focus on based on their experiences.

As for not pushing your characters to the breaking point, why not? It doesn't make them seem more impressive. In fact it would make them less interesting. Pushing a character to or past their breaking point allows for growth and creates depth. It isn't a bad thing.

[member="Dunames Lopez"]

 

[NightSister]

[member="James Justice"] I only just saw the second because I got the notification before the edit, but hi. The split personality thing is something that has interested me. Because of the vast number of mental health disorders there are to experiment, I'm almost more excited to write the post-breakage than I am the breakage itself, which I'm still not 100% sure how it will be done but it's revolving around some sort of psychological mindgames thing. As in not loss in the sense of a loved one dying but in a part of your identity being destroyed. And of course, one thing will lead to another until by the end of everything Aria'll be very lost and confused to say the least. Ah, hurting characters is such fun.

Anyway, I believe I've got somebody down for the job but I definitely want to do some threads afterwards with her lashing out randomly or something like that, and I have been wanting to write with you for a while, so if that sounds like your thing then let me know.

 

[Teynara Jeralyr]

[member="Kurayami Bloodborn"]

The answer to that is easy: breaking a character requires you to take a risk, and when done effectively, is the sign of good writing. As you said, it makes a character more interesting, but also exposes their weaknesses/foibles, and forces them to see themselves for what they truly are, rather than the confident facade they often perceive ahead of time. That's rather hard to do when you don't write your characters as having actual weaknesses

[member="Aria Vale"]

The danger with a split personality is ultimately how unpredictable it can be - and, let's be honest, if your mind fragments that far, chances are that it'll do so further than that. It's also near-impossible to effectively repair (though a Jedi Healer might be able to do it, now that I think about it). It'd take some excellent writing to pull it off well. I'm positive you could do it, but I daresay it'll be really tricky.

 

[Ugohr Poof]

[member="Kurayami Bloodborn"] It's very easy to fall into the trap of miswriting a character from a species that has very little extant societal, cultural and psychological information and about whom virtually all known information is biological and/or physical in nature, especially the more obscure the species is, and just attribute a poorly-written trait to the species if you're consistent in your writing (I might have fallen into that pitfall with Dunames because Polydroxols are one such species; nearly all the known information point towards them being a species of organic Terminator-1000s, which pretty much rule out a lot of physical means to break them). But no, not all species will break the same, nor will they recover, or react, the same, given a particular mechanism for breaking.

Dunames is still a well-traveled, opportunistic, ultracapitalist megalomaniac (these things have been well-played and still made her worth playing, especially with her very own Star Tours being IMO my greatest achievement as a player), with piloting skill across a wide variety of ship sizes. Just that I never made much of a point of Dunames' strength of character or self-awareness, OOC or IC, before, but that might be because I never let her get into more trouble than absolutely necessary.

I'd rather see a deep cast, a deep universe, more than simply deep characters, but the depth of the cast is not the sum of the depths of the individual characters, nor is the depth of the universe simply the sum of the depths of the settings, plots and cast.

 

[James Justice]

[member="Aria Vale"]

Wooo! ^.^ I feel special.

I am shelving Jamesy for a while but Akio could be your boi if your game for that.

 

[Kurayami Bloodborn]

[member="Ugohr Poof"]

When there isn't much to go off of as far as societal, cultural, or psychological information then there is plenty of room to mess around with the baseline and still stay true to the species itself. With the physical/biological description you can make an inference as to the other portions. Now you bring up a Polydroxyl as an example. After reading over the short description on Wookie, it would actually be rather easy to physically break such a species. Not through one singular hit most likely(unless it was a devastating one), but through attrition. Keep up a constant stream of physical damage and eventually it will die as it can no longer repair the damage. This could easily be done in a myriad of ways. Sonic,(especially through the use of resonant frequency), heat, cold, opposing magnetic fields pulling it apart, etc. The list seriously goes on for the physical realm.

Also if you had read my comment, I never said differing species would break the same, nor that they would recover in anything of a similar fashion, and it wasn't even an implication. I was making the point that there is going to be reasonable variation based on each individual within a species, which is why I mentioned the experiences of the character. I was saying that there are various means with which to break any species, both physically and mentally. And what you mention about Dunames is one reason that I feel no real compulsion to read her posts. Even if they are well written, I already know that based on what you just said she is going to be an arrogant, self centered, money hungry queen in the thread. Oh and she can apparently fly different ships. Great, really shows a lot of depth. If you are that scared to have her face anything resembling a challenge then I would dare say that it is a boring arc with little place to go, especially if you refuse to push her to a point where she is feeling like she has to question anything about her possible flaws and/or weaknesses.

To address your final point here, you can have an extremely deep universe, tons of other fluff that is developed( from the caste system of every planet to socioeconomic climate including taxes, imports, exports, fees, the cost of living, to the geography inherent to every single biome of each planet in the galaxy and how the temperature differential effects life there) but what makes a story worth reading and memorable are the characters. So give me the basics on the background, and add to it as the story continues, but focus on the ones who inhabit this wonderful galaxy and the challenges they have faced that made them who they are. Then work on keeping them interesting by letting them be challenged in the future as well.