Character Creation and Critique

[AdmiralPiet]

We have several topics on characters already:

Choice of character names: About finding names for characters

Diving into Characters: Focusses on deep diving into characters and how that may affect the author

Character descriptions in rape fantasies... are bad: Which puts focus on physical descriptions

This topic touches on all of that to an extent and ties some things together.
My goal would be to use this as a place where authors can ask for help on creating characters or ask for feedback on stuff they already have.
Bounce ideas off of each other.

Character creation is not just a name and a physical description (apart from throw away figures that serve as extra)
A character has a personality, a motivation, a history. Even if it is not needed for the story at hand, and not developed, I guess most authors think about, or have a vague idea who the caracter is apart from the glimpse we see in the actual scene.

The more in depth the story gets the more the author has to think about these elements.
It is also dependent on how realistic or grounded the story is meant to be.
@Claire 's Mark from "Record Chaser" is quite a different approach to a character than my own Harold Miller from "Hostile work environment", or @Vela Nanashi 's fantasy characters.

Years ago I found several checklists on tumblr that were meant to help authors to flesh out their characters.
With questions like: "What is their day job?", "What is their favorite free time activity?", "What stye of clothing do they prefer?"
These where surely not a bad idea, but most seemed to be geared towards contemporary characters in stories that were meant to be more wholesome than what we do here.

I did try one with my Lady Sokara OC, but gave up quickly.
What is their day job?: idk, is being a champion of the Dark Gods and the despotic ruler of a daemon world considered a day job?
What is their favorite free time activity?: Being the despotic ruler of a daemon world
What stye of clothing do they prefer?: Chaos corrupted plate armour that leaves the sexy bits exposed...

The idea for this topic came when I discussed some aspects of "Record Chaser" with @Claire and was asked (paraphrased): "What could a victim say to your character that would rattle her?"
And I honestly do not know.

Her main attributes are: She is tall, muscular, reddish brown hair with side cut, blue eyes, tattooed, very big tits and has a big cock. She is mean, sadistic, a bit masochistic, follower of Chaos from Warhammer 40k, dominant, and likes to rape women. Job: Captain to the personal guard of the afore mentioned Lady Sokara.
Beyond that I have some feeleing for what and how she is, but I never developed her backstory much. To this day I have not decided if her cock is something she had from birth, or a later mutation.

Her lover and second in command Caelyn is pretty much a copy of her, but blonde and green eyed. I tried to get some more flavour in by making her more wacko and unstable than Freya.
Also in terms on sexuality: Freya has a prefered type: Young woman with big breast, but not exclusively. Caelyn is more open and less focussed on physical attractiveness.

This is more or less enough for a standard rape and torture story. Them being immune to being shamed by a victim for their deeds, and insults only encouraging or maybe enraging them their function is to be part of the inevitable horror their victims face. Within the 40k fanstory there is no escape, as there usually is not a world beyond the basement where there is safety and help.

Most of the characters that populate this world are like that. I would like to develop them some more, but I find that hard to do without changing them too much for the setting.

Do you have a character you struggle with developing?
How do you go about creating a new character?

[Vela Nanashi]

I guess my brain has wonderful cheating facilities for creating characters, I collect some aspects I want for a new character and pour those aspects into a character and name it and then plant that in my mind and it comes to life as an independent being from me, that I can force to do things when I want to, but mostly drop into a situation and then I enter one of the characters and ride them, just trying to document what happens in my inner world.

I guess the hardest part for me is if I have to write about a character that does not interest me, it will likely fail to awaken then, and if it fails to awaken I can not write about the character or at least not from their point of view in a good way. You may see an example of a not awakened fully character if you read Tariq the Fool, that was me puppeteering a corpse, it was clearly not as deep into the character as my other works, at least it was clear to me In that story Cassandra was vibrantly alive and she comments on things in my life frequently, like a lot of my characters do, and they beg me to write more stories with them in

Without this cheating mechanism in my brain I would not be able to write as well as I do

[Claire]

I never found these checklists with a bunch of questions like "What is the character's dayjob?" particularly helpful. My characters are usually created with a purpose in mind and the details of their personality/appearance are then designed with that purpose in mind.

Let me give you one example: When I wrote Late Satisfaction, I knew that I wanted to explore the role of institutional power in sexual abuse. I knew that the victim would not get raped by being physically overpowered but by freezing out of fear of the consequences if she resists.

From that central idea, the protagonist of the story, Eleanor, follows almost immediately. She is tall, strong, a kickboxer. Her entire design as a character exists for the purpose of driving home the point that in the scenario the story explores the rapist being physically stronger than her is not the issue - because he is not.

Once that aspect of her character is set in stone, a few other things follow almost immediately. As a tall woman who studies math and is a kickboxer she obviously has to be a person who is comfortable with defying gender norms. And because she does that, her personal history must include instances of her being judged, eyed suspiciously, and/or being admired for defying gender norms.

I could go further, but I think that is in general the most effective way for me to come up with a character. I start with an idea that I want to explore with a story and then design the character that I feel is best suited to help me explore that idea.

[AdmiralPiet]

I never found these checklists with a bunch of questions like "What is the character's dayjob?" particularly helpful. My characters are usually created with a purpose in mind and the details of their personality/appearance are then designed with that purpose in mind.

I think they were geared more for OC's that would be used in a lot of shorter stories or roleplay.
As I said above, they didn't help me much either, but the base idea isn't that bad I think.

I understood them less as a "Here, you have to check all these boxes, or else your character is bad"
More like: "Did you give these things some thought?"

If I look at that example with Eleanor I would say you did do what the checklist intended: Give your character some depth and thought.
Even beyond the checklist. I think the intention was to give authors that don't do this naturally some anchor points to think about their character, and maybe spot errors along the way.
If a beginning author uses one of those lists it would also be legitimate to mark some boxes that are not relevant to the story at hand as: "Not aplicable".
Now, I agree that the checklists, even the better ones are not very useful in general, but I think for some people they can be a starting point.

Or, if you have a lot of characters a shorter list with basic attributes: Body stats, Job, Hobby, fave food and drink, fave celebrity can provide some help in keeping less used characters consistent.

I have seen stories where the described character did not fit with itself.
For example I did that in "Freya's new slaves". It is a minor mistake, but it bugs me a lot.
In the beginning I wrote that both Muriel and Selia are very beautiful and have "unblemished" skin. That was influenced by a picture from the artist Ferres that I used as internal reference, and he has a very clean and polished style. That they are both from an Agri-World did not have much significance at first. I thought of some backwater planet that wouldn't be heavily defended so a slavers raid would be feasible. Only later when I wrote the scene where Selia remembers spying on her friend having sex with a farmhand, and while developing their backstory in my mind did I spot the inconsistency: I described them as working class, in good physical condition because of it. That does not mesh with the perfect skinned beauties.

If/when I rewrite that story they will have tanned skin, caloused hands and some other faint marks that reflect their life as working class citizens on an agri-world.
Not saying a checklist would have saved me there, and it is very minor a mistake but it highlights this: In the beginning I did spent more thought on the feasibility of them being abducted by pirates/slavers than on the actual characters.

[RapeU]

Generally I don't do a checklist of traits for characters. Someone used a template for commenting on stories and I used it for a while before feeling like using a template every single time isn't exactly personalized feedback for me. So if I were to try that for characters, it would get tedious really fast.

For my characters, some of them are traits from people I know in real life, either blended or full traits. In The CUNT Rapist after I got through the second chapter I realized I needed a college roommate. The protagonist Alex was reserved, depressed, awkward, and felt invisible. Summer Phillips was then born. I took a little backstory from a family member (father worked in oil company and the relative had to move around a lot.) Then I decided Summer should have a sister with a backstory of someone I knew who wanted to transition female to male, changed her name to Milo, but for whatever reason never actually did the full transition. So the combination of people in my life made Summer feel more real.