Characters being weird

[Throne3d]

I don't know if there's any other obvious place to put this – maybe Sandbox Discussions? – but this could be for when you really need to discuss how your character is being weird.

When they're doing something unexpected, or they're gripped by two very dramatic and strong emotions, when they're running away from you with plot and you have no idea where they're going until they're almost there, whatever. When the character is being a person, and it's weird.

I hope this isn't (and I don't think it is) a thing only I get.

For example! (Spoilers!) At this point of a 'One of the most wonderful places', with CuriousDiscoverer, Theo thought he might burst into tears because of a weird backstory and a bunch of conflicting emotions, and then his head went a bit weird and so he thought he might cry. He didn't quite beg me to just not write that, but he didn't really want to start crying at the beginning of a scene, and I decided it would divert the story a bit too much and decided to brush it to the side (which I maybe shouldn't have? oops).

I sorta know why he wanted to cry, but I wasn't expecting it until I'd written half the post and he started telling me he was going to and didn't want to.

Likewise, yesterday, in A fresh start (more spoilers!), he was squirming a lot and wanting to run away a lot, and I didn't totally get why, except for the general feeling of 'I don't want to be here' – I thought I might have to come up with "his dad is secretly a demon" to cover for his weird behavior, because it was on that level of weirdness. I only knew more approximately here, when I knew something was actually wrong (instead of just thinking I might have to pause to try to make something up), and then here, when I knew he felt like running but didn't totally need to, and I didn't have a proper idea of how he was reacting or why until the next reply, when he actually ran.

There have been a few scenarios like that. It's really weird. Does anybody else get it? Any examples that stick out?

[Adelene]

That happens all the time. Lurker is horrible about it. I was not actually expecting her to go talk to the Jedi in the box with her and Occlus, I was expecting her to go 'NOPE, scary', as a recent example.

Seriously, though. Constantly. *chuckle*

[Throne3d]

That happens all the time. Lurker is horrible about it. I was not actually expecting her to go talk to the Jedi in the box with her and Occlus, I was expecting her to go 'NOPE, scary', as a recent example.

Seriously, though. Constantly. *chuckle*

I don't understand it! About a month and a half ago, I had a half-formed idea of how Theo would act and what his personality would be like, and he was slow to write but I could get into his mindset and write him, with a bit of effort. He was just a vague idea of a character in my head and it felt like I was pretending to be me, altered a bit, in that scenario.

More recently, he's sped up a lot in how he responds to things, and with some things I have no doubt about how he will react, because it's practically a requirement that he do something – if I tried to write him doing something else, it would feel really horribly wrong, and then he'd go moody and be slow to write for the rest of the day. He has knee-jerk reactions to some specific things and some things that he just will not do.

And then sometimes it just feels weirdly wrong to write him as I was expecting, despite him being a character in my head, and so I just do what he seems to want, don't understand why he's acting that way, and then finally he does something that makes it all click and I feel a bit like I'm reading the story instead of writing it. He sits in a box, doesn't let me know what his train of thought is like, and gives me actions that he plans on performing but doesn't let me understand why until I form the proper conclusion myself. (Or, alternatively, he's just being stubborn and wants me to come up with an interesting reason for it, but it seems the same either way.)

It's still fun, but it's very weird.

[Kappa]

My characters do this all the time. Awake characters are weird.

[pedromvilar]

Depends on what you mean by "weird" here but Sadde has done unexpected things several times and added to/derailed plots with it. The first example that comes to mind is asking Ashras out on a date.

[Throne3d]

Depends on what you mean by "weird" here

... Probably "awake and not acting as you expected". Which is weird (to me at least) because the characters are in my head, so really my model of them should be pretty good.

My model is typically good (again, because they live in my head and most of their creation was me thinking through their personality consciously), so it's pretty surprising when they don't act as I expect, especially if it's in some dramatic way and I get hardly any feedback as to why.

[rockeye_stonetoe]

Steel is sort of passively weird in that she really likes big hammers. Why? No answer. Nothing else she likes points in that direction. But there it is.

[RoboticLIN]

Even the most virtuous of men can commit atrocities in the right circumstance.

I feel it's more to me that I have absolutely no idea how a character would act until I start getting some stuff going. The concept of a 'box' you feed ideas through feels about right. Even if you peg your character somewhere based on something like morality or good vs evil, you're still half the story in the end. That, and a constant flow of your own different perspectives day to day attempting to grasp at yesterday's train of thought based on simple notes and the enroaching canonical actions you've done so far.

Relax there budday! It's aaaaall good.

[AndaisQ]

My characters vary pretty substantially on this. (My settings get in on it a lot of the time as well - Whateley's Detroit Incident developed in some very, very unexpected directions behind the scenes.)

Anya is among the worst; her meta-instance has extremely strong opinions on what she is, and she will stop a plot in its fucking tracks if she has to to get what she wants. Johanna once reached through the page and forced me to draw intricate geometric patterns for more than three hours, though, so she's in the running.

Other notable instances include the time Alicorn and I tried to make Cam and Ari kiss and they ended up threatening to destroy each other, but Ari maintains that that was Cam's fault, and it's really not worth arguing with him when he gets like this.

[ErinFlight]

Alex and Cam did not get along. Alex gets along with everyone. But no, apparently he wants to be rude to the one person who actually has the ability to help him. He's still pouting.
It did give me the incentive to create some new characters though, so it turned out okay. I just need to give Alex some time and maybe have Glen drag him back if he keeps being ridiculous.