First off, I looked at the general line-up you usually have in superhero-type shows and beyond, since these archetypes often show up even outside of shows about characters with superpowers. While there's a lot of variations from show to show on which are included, often mixed and matched with other, less prevalent character types, the most common archetypes are as follows:
- The Leader: The 'poster child' of the show. Likely will get the most screen-time, depth and character development. Usually either a white male model of perfection, simultaneously the smartest and strongest of the group (or increasingly often just the smartest), or an out-of-their-depth everyman thrust into leadership by happenstance or destiny who has to angst and worry about whether they're up to the job. Examples include Superman pretty much every time he's teamed up with other superheroes, Robin from Teen Titans, Twilight Sparkle from Friendship is Magic, Blossom from The Powerpuff Girls, Ash Ketchum from Pokémon, and Lion-O from Thundercats.
- The Fast One: A character gifted with super-speed. Fast and nimble, they're sometimes a fast-talker too, talking themselves in and out of trouble in the blink of an eye. Often overconfident and aggressive. Examples include Rev Runner (the version of the Roadrunner) from Loonatics Unleashed, Blurr (debatable whether his abilities count as super-speed, but I'm counting him anyway) from Transformers, Rainbow Dash from Friendship is Magic, and The Flash in any DC Universe show.
- The Supernatural One: Depending on whether the show is fantasy or sci-fi based, the character has either magic or psychic powers. Regardless of where the power comes from, they're often either the quiet introvert or the overly nice optimist that can unleash ungodly powerful attacks if angered or provoked. Examples include (again) Twilight Sparkle from Friendship is Magic, Aang from Avatar: the Last Airbender, Raven from Teen Titans, and Bubbles from The Powerpuff Girls.
- The Strong One: Often physically large to an absurd degree (e.g. Strong Mad from Homestar Runner), this character is the one with super strength and stamina. Often cast as a 'papa bear' to weaker characters, and will fly into a berserk rage if those they care for are threatened, they're not only the best fighter (often defeated either by a villain who is extremely agile or one who defeats this character to show how serious a threat they are, often turning the hero into a joke in the viewer's eyes when done too often) Although the stereotype is being phased out and currently almost non-existant, time was that they would be portrayed as rather dim and monosyllabic. Examples include Clem from Xiaolin Showdown, Cyborg from Teen Titans, Grimlock from Transformers G1, and Applejack from Friendship is Magic.
- The Mascot: Some form of non-typical (i.e. is of a vastly different species than the rest of the team) character who aids the team. Their usefulness varies wildly from useless idiot getting themselves into trouble to fulfilling any of the above archetypes. May or may not have the ability to speak, and often is either the smartest (if they don't speak) or dumbest (if they do speak) characters on the team. Examples include the eponymous Scooby-Doo, Snarf from '80s Thundercats, Rufus from Kim Possible, and Spike from Friendship is Magic.
With those very fast and loose guidelines laid down, I set about building five characters to fit into these archetypes. Immediately I knew I didn't want to play these clichés straight, but I also thought that just doing a parody would be too easy. It's far more challenging to play with conventions in a (relatively) serious manner than it is to just have a lazy jab at the genre conventions by having characters point out clichés in dialogue (e.g. having a cast full of non-whites except for one who is the leader, and then having one of the characters spout off something like "why's the white guy always in charge?").
So my thought process turned to how to subvert expectations without doing it in an over the top Team America: World Police fashion. First came the leader.
Since characters like these are almost always men, being female was the first attribute to be added. Next, I knew that while it's almost unheard of nowadays to have a 100% white cast, the non-white(s) in the group are often token and defined by their race. I'm of the belief that things like race and gender inform characters, but they don't make up their sole character trait like they do so often in media. Thus, I knew that while this woman would not be white, I didn't want her to conform to the standard traits that non-white races are almost always saddled with. When I was reminded of a webshow episode in which the host mentioned off-hand how unique it was for BraveStarr to have a Native American hero, I chose that as her race, since token non-whites are often either black or Latino, making it a path less traveled that was ripe for exploration. However, even an ethnicity this rare to see still has a lot of stereotypical traits in media. There was going to be no 'holy man' style natural healing rituals, or any other throwbacks to the kind of things you'd see Native Americans see and do in old Hollywood westerns.
However, as stated above, your race still informs you to some degree. Thus, I had as part of the character's backstory the idea that her parents were very traditional and stuck in old ways, refusing to accept any ideas that didn't line up with their philosophy, sort of like trading out fanatical God worship and religious piety with desperately clinging to Native American culture and barely veiled racism towards white people. It also gives the character that little extra bit of conflict: a past full of anguish over being torn between being forced by her parents to keep her dying culture alive whilst trying to adapt to a real world that contradicts it. Even for a story taking place a vaguely defined amount of time in the future, I believe there'd still be holdouts trying to maintain outdated traditions and hoping to one day recreate some mythical past that probably didn't even exist in the way they imagine. Hell, we went to the moon a half century ago and have handheld devices that contain all human knowledge and yet people still think women and black people are automatically inferior and that being gay is a death-penalty offence.
Next was another girl, this one to fit into the supernatural archetype. I immediately wanted to get a balance between the extremes of Teen Titans' Raven and The Powerpuff Girls' Bubbles, and not have her be completely normal at all times besides times of extreme anger. From that constraint came the idea of an upbeat, friendly and outgoing personality, but one who doesn't go to the extremes of energy and generally being very sociable that some cartoons go to. With that decided on, how she would use her powers clicked in my mind. She would have the rather standard duo of psychic powers, telekinesis and very limited mind reading abilities (because I find that characters able to fully read peoples' minds usually end up just spouting exposition and being used in cheap ways to continue the plot, as well as the writer having to constantly contrive ways for the powers to not work when they would solve the plot instantly), but she would use them to make up for her disability: she's blind.
A disabled character in a show like this often made up a member of teams made up entirely of token characters, created in an attempt to make up for the prevailingly white male characters in media of the past by having the cast be so impossibly diverse that it becomes laughable. However, the way this would always be done is to just put one of the characters in a wheelchair and call it a day. I didn't want to go that way, and one of the major inspirations for the decision was the 'visual novel' Katawa Shoujo.
 |
| The main cast of said game, from left to right, Lilly, who is blind, Hanako, who is badly burned, Rin, who has no arms, Emi, who has no legs, and Misha, who is the interpreter for Shizune, who is deaf |
The characters aren't one-dimensional cut-outs with one stock character trait for you to unlock voyeuristic sex scenes, they're deep and developed people with issues and hang-ups just like anyone else, and they're anything but defined by their disability. While it certainly informs their character, for example the accident that cost Emi her legs and her father also caused her to keep people at arms length lest she becomes attached to someone and then lose them too, it's just another part of who they are. While in other media these disabilities would be treated as something 'wrong' with them that 'needs to be fixed', here the character you play isn't a white knight coming in to 'save' the girl from her disability. Indeed, choosing the option to act like that on the occasions when you're given Choose Your Own Adventure style multiple-option decisions to make throughout the story, you'll often end up with the 'Bad Ending'. As stated above, this is a part of who they are; returning to Emi as an example, you don't mollycoddle her and 'protect' her from her lack of legs, she's the star athlete of the running team. She's doing fine without you. What you do do is show her how not getting emotionally attached to people isn't going to keep her from heartbreak, and help her open up to people in more ways than just being superficially nice to people.
I often hear people say that they have that one movie or book or game that they watched/played/whatever, and when it was over they came out of the experience a different person. For me, it was this visual novel. When I'd finished playing all the different routes, my outlook on the world had changed for the better, giving me a sense of understanding of not just the disabled but people in general. It taught me a lot about how people work and think and react to things, all from a bunch of fictional characters that are just a series of stills with text in front of them.
Although it wasn't a conscious influence at first, beyond what it taught me about character writing and how people in this kind of situation deal with the cards life has dealt them, indeed the initial image of this character I had in my head was a bubbly, happy version of Visas from Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords (who incidentally possesses almost every character trait of the Supernatural One 'loner' variant), increasingly I envisioned the character as a tall blonde Caucasian. Although I did my best to make sure I wasn't just ripping off Lilly from Katawa Shoujo, I found that as I was mentally picturing the story during the writing stage, I think she shared quite a bit of Lilly's quietly confident gracefulness. Her blindness doesn't make her clumsy in the slightest; when she makes a drink for a customer I imagined the items gliding through the air like a swift, efficient ballet. I don't know whether that comes across in the script, but it's intriguing to me how many very subtle influences a character can have on another, very different character.
Up next was the one with superspeed. Since the team didn't yet have an introvert, I decided it would be prudent to put them in this position. With two girls already set, it made sense to make it 50/50 male/female. Another Caucasian this time, I didn't want him to be tied down to the very overdone 'loner' introvert archetype. Coming up with other ways to do an introvert, I came up with the concept of a prickly, unsociable type of person. When I thought about why the character was like this, the answer came instantly: he's gay. Thus, again returning to the idea that even in the future people still aren't over this kind of thing, he would have faced considerable bullying from others and a lot of inner turmoil over his identity. Although he would soften to the point of being willing to join the team by the end of the movie, he would still not let his defenses down around the other characters throughout the series, making him the kind of introvert who actively shuns social contact rather than the usual 'I have a heart of gold but no-one understands me!' type you see far too often. Again this was a subconscious influence, I only noticed the connection as I typed this up, but he also has parallels with a Katawa Shoujo character. This time, he's reminiscent of the character Misha, who despite being the most loud, obnoxious extrovert imaginable is in fact a lesbian who has had a very tough childhood with being bullied for her sexuality, to the point that she has suicidal thoughts. My character is the polar opposite of Misha in attitude towards others, yet deep down has so many similarities with her in hindsight. Again, these weird little influences are so subtle that they may be just coincidence, but make for interesting connections nonetheless.
Next came a character who was ultimately removed from the storyline, the Strong One. Again playing with race to subvert expectations, since this character is generally black or white, I initially made him Latino. However, when I couldn't really grasp any character traits from the idea of a muscled Latino beyond the extremely stereotypical ones like womanising and calling people "ese", I changed him to Asian. Then the idea for his character would be that he's got a good decade or so on the rest of the cast, and thus is far more jaded and cynical, possibly even an alcoholic. Since it became clear early on that there would be no room in the movie to give him a proper story arc that wove neatly around the others, I decided it was better to just cut him and leave him to be introduced later during the hypothetical first season. Were I to actually write the rest of the movie and the season, I'd have to greatly rework this character's personality, since during development of the outline when I nailed down each of the main cast's roles, I realised that beyond her backstory, I didn't have anything in the way of personality for the leader, so I recycled this character's personality for hers.
Last up was the mascot. Since I wanted to put new spins on the formula, I toyed with having this character as the author surrogate for the movie. So often the character the audience is supposed to relate to is your standard young white male hero, yet we've proven time and again that we can empathise with non-human characters just fine. Hell, often we're more sympathetic to animals than we are to humans (e.g. humans get killed even in children's movies all the time with little problem, yet Bambi's mother, Old Yeller and Mufasa dying can scar children for life). So, why not have an inhuman creature be our window into the world? After all, we need a character unfamiliar with the situation to ask the questions the audience are asking, so it can feasibly be done if the character is as clueless about the world of the movie as we are.
While the idea of the mascot being the point-of-view character we follow was dropped eventually, his story I created for him to explain his unfamiliarity with the setting and his integral role in the plot remained. He would be part of an advance scouting force of a previously unseen alien force who would invade the world at the climax of the film, and would return as the main antagonists of the series (perhaps acting as a sword of Damocles hanging over the characters rather than an actual tangible threat a lot of the time, like how the Cylons were often used on the 2003 Battlestar Galactica series). Created as a mindless automaton built to serve the evil aliens, he would somehow gain sentience at the start of the movie, and would learn about humanity throughout the movie, eventually repelling the initial invasion by sacrificing himself at the end of the movie. Oh, and he'd be a robot dog, because even a one-off character who dies at the end of his only appearance needs to have opportunities for merchandising.
With that, there were only two things left to decide: the ages of the characters and their names. I had a good idea of who these characters were by this point, so it was merely a case of lining up an age that felt right for each character. They had to be young enough to be physically active but old enough to not be children, making the twenties the average. Thus, the leader is slightly older but not much, so was set in her late twenties-early thirties. The psychic is far younger and more innocent, but it didn't fit with my mental image of her to make her too young (i.e. mid teens), and so settled on her early twenties. The fast guy felt like he was right down the middle, not too far to either end of the spectrum, making him in his mid-twenties. The last human character was, as previously mentioned, jaded by his advanced years, placing him in his early forties.
Now all that remained was the names. I'm not very good with titles for stories, and that Achilles heel extends to naming characters. If I'd just gave them whatever names came to mind, they'd all have boring names like Jack and Susan. So, I did like all writers do in this situation: trawled baby name sites for names, often narrowing the search for names of specific races. After a while, I had my characters.
- Nina: Female, early thirties, Native American, the leader. A washed-up alcoholic. When the name came up as a Native American name, I instantly gravitated towards it. It's believable as a name for a person of her race to be given, and is 'white' enough that it doesn't require three pounds of phlegm to pronounce.
- Alyssa: Female, early twenties, Caucasian, blind since birth, gifted with psychic powers. Outgoing and fun-loving. I'm not sure where the name came from, but I felt it was an actual name people in the real world use that's unusual enough to not be just another Jane or Jill, but without being strange enough to be stupid.
- Jon: Male, mid twenties, Caucasian, closeted homosexual, enhanced with technology to be inhumanly agile. Guarded, untrusting and unfriendly. This was a case where the name was picked for no good reason other than it just felt right. The alternate spelling makes it less overused too.
- Taiko: Male, early forties, Asian, possesses incredible strength and stamina through a combination of years of training and cybernetic enhancements. Apparently Taiko is an actual name in Japan, and since a taiko drum is a relatively well known instrument in the West, it
- The nameless robotic canine. I thought it would add to the character's anonymity of just another robot in an identical army of thousands to not have the characters name the thing, and add to the pathos of his demise to have gained a personality and moral values by the end, but still lacked an identity.
Now, a character when fully developed is a lot like an iceberg, you only see a small fraction of it. Stuff like Jon being bullied for his sexuality, Nina's parents, this kind of thing helps you develop and get a handle on a character, but it's likely not to come up in the actual script. It may do, but it's unlikely. For example, the writers of Shaun of the Dead wrote down pages and pages of backstory for each of the characters, and then wrote the script with this knowledge in mind. Some of it ended up influencing character actions, e.g. Dianne did a series of children's adaptations called 'Great Shakes' in the past, which is why she's the one to give acting lessons to the others when they prepare to pretend to be zombies. Again, while it may not come into play, knowing these details about the characters is very important, since it may end up becoming part of the plot when you least expect it.
Speaking of the plot...
No comments:
Post a Comment