- [+] My answers from the old thread
- Ooh, fun! I can't recall if I did the V4 one of these.
Samantha Reynolds: I saw Evo apps had opened, freaked out, and slammed out a character pretty much wholly on the fly, grabbing a bunch of random traits. At the time I made her, I had no idea if Evo was going to be successful or not, so I figured I'd just put in pretty minimal effort at the profile stage, so it wouldn't be too huge a loss if I got bored/hated writing her/whatever. I fully intended to Hero her out by halfway. Then, I actually ended up having a total blast with her. This one was just random luck.
Oh, also, it turned out user couldn't see Evo apps at the time I did all this, so she ended up being the first profile in 'cause I forgot I had mod-sight.
Karl Chalmers: For Karl, I had two big goals. The first was to make a character very specific to the setting. The second was to write someone pretty despicable and then make them into a decent/sympathetic person, while keeping in place all the things that made them despicable. A Program apologist fit the bill pretty nicely on both counts. My original intention with Karl was to turn him into a hero of some sort over time, deal with him overcoming the fact that everyone hates him, etc. Then story went, "Hey, can I take him hostage?" and I went, "Sure, why not?" and it was a total blast all around. The specifics of his profile are mostly from the city (I actually did some research) and stuff that seemed to fit well into the Program world.
Nikki Campbell: For Nikki, I wanted to play with voice/loosen up my writing style. As such, I made a character very different from myself. I made her someone with very visual interests, because I'm not a visual person and tend to suck at imagery. I made her profile in such a way that I'd get someone a little weird and with a lot of imagination.
Karen Ruiz: Karen was mostly written as a challenge. I originally never expected her to be particularly successful. Basically, a few trends in villains (especially the power players) in SOTF were bothering me, and I was complaining about them to storyspoiler, who said, basically, "Why don't you write one and avoid those things?" Karen was written to be a player with a non-sadistic motivation. I made her a girl because the majority of female players, at least the high-kill ones, are sexualized to at least some degree, and I thought it'd be very interesting to write a character who was far from that. After that, it was just a matter of figuring out details. A lot of the stuff I put into her profile was very standard player stuff (black trench coat, loner, mostly silent and a bit odd). The goal was to make a character who fell into the power player mold as closely as possible, with the exception of motivation, then play it absolutely 100% straight and try to squeeze some quality out of the result. I also wanted to play with having a somewhat sympathetic player. Oh, also, her profile was designed to set up her career as a big player while at the same time looking like it was pointing in the opposite direction. This represents probably the second most work I've ever put into a profile, and the most into planning a character.
Renée Carlson: Renée was actually supposed to be a guy originally, but SDA only had about three girls at the time, so I reworked her concept. I wanted to do the same thing for TV that I had for Program with Karl, that is, create a character who only fit in the specific universe. When it comes to actual content, though, she was somewhat his opposite; on the surface, she's a pretty nice person, trying to do good things, but if you dig a little deeper, a lot of her ideas are pretty messed up. She's not really gone quite the way I envisioned (I actually originally was considering dropping Karen ~halfway, once she'd killed enough folks to make a splash, and was going to do more with Renée/make her my more major character), but it's still been very interesting.
Richard Ormsby was written to be a more realistic/current-era-appropriate form of V3's Josh Goodman. He was a big, grumpy, aggressive guy bordering on premade, who I always intended to have--I believe the wrestling term is "job for" some other villainous but less imposing sort I liked right at the start of the game. He wasn't really a character I had much of a plan/vision behind, more someone I created very intentionally to be an early-game character.
William Lohman was a character where I was toying around with greater cooperation and planning, both of which are the bane of my existence. Writing Will did absolutely nothing to change that. Elena and I had a specific plan, the details of which I struggle to remember--I think it was gonna be like a more intentional take on PV1's tower girls?--but unfortunately Elena got swamped with stuff and I moved out of the country right when the time to really get going came around. If I recall correctly, Will's profile was written to dovetail with whatever we had planned, but I honestly can't remember too much and he ended up only barely remaining active.
Alexander Bonham was half of a two-part concept for PV2, along with Robin. Basically, I noticed that V1-3 had these really clear-cut heroes and villains of a sort that largely vanished in V4. I theorized that this was largely due to the move towards greater realism encouraging a larger degree of moral ambiguity, but also thought that didn't necessarily mean there was no longer any place for such characters. Alex, then, was written to be a V1 hero through a V4 lens of realism. He was exactly the sort of person to be cavalier and take-charge and give like eight-paragraph monologues about why getting along was the best way to survive. He was also a total unapologetic jerk, because a lot of those heroic behaviors really are signs of ego problems and/or are antisocial in their own rights. He was meant to show that doing the decent thing doesn't always mesh well with being even vaguely likable.
Robin Pounds was the other half of that, and the goal with her was to write a villain who was full stop bonkers. I had a lot of different ideas with what the source of the crazy would be, because it really did need something behind it--V1-3 villains often lacked reason most noticeably, and that wouldn't fly by current standards. I had a lot of ideas, ranging from playing with a heat motif to issues regarding weakness and the pressure of being watched, but in the end Condor brought Shawn around and I latched onto him and never let go (Thanks for putting up with that, by the way).
Austin White was based on a couple people I knew in high school, one of whom I honestly would not be surprised to discover went off to become a serial killer or something. It turned out writing from the perspective of a character based on people I didn't care for at all was a really bad idea, and halfway through his first post I gave up and started over and decided I'd only write statements of fact into his posts, except for his dialogue where he'd lie all the time. This was a huge pain in the neck to write, and turned a character I'd been planning to focus on into more of a burden than anything else.
Jewel Evans was written in like two hours to replace the other character I'd had planned for TV2, because a group plan fell through. My main deal with her was a mulligan on my really poor understanding of what being goth was in V4.
What Inspires Your Characters? (New Site Version!)
Credit to Jack, Kami, and Claire for old threads/suggesting a return
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MurderWeasel
- Posts: 3442
- Joined: Mon Aug 06, 2018 9:56 am
- Team Affiliation: Jewel's Leviathans
What Inspires Your Characters? (New Site Version!)
Back in the day, there were a few threads offering a spot to give behind-the-scenes looks into the creation process for characters. This came up in a call the other day, and there was a little interest in a new one, so here you go! Talk about what led you to create the characters you did here, if you want to!
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Dogs231
- Posts: 607
- Joined: Mon Oct 12, 2020 6:45 pm
- Location: The Pear Wiggler
- Team Affiliation: Emmy's Selkies
Cory Cartwright, my first character on the site, wasn't supposed to exist. At first, I didn't intend to participate at all in TV3. At the time, I didn't feel it aligned with my tastes and assumed I wouldn't feel as invested in it. In hindsight, this was a terrible and incorrect mindset, and I highly regret having bought into it.
I was, however, persuaded by Lore to write a character, ostensibly for practice. I conceived the concept and wrote the profile in a matter of hours. He, as a character, was designed in a way that would solve two problems; how to justify his relative absence from pregame and how to get the most educational experience possible in SOTF.
As a result, I designed Cory as an intentionally rudimentary and isolated character; with almost no friends and an open-ended personality, I gave myself room to breathe and explore my options. From there, he crystallized into the person he would remain throughout the game.
I am ultimately glad to have participated in TV3, and my greatest regret for that version will be not submitting a second character.
Alexander "Lex" Latimer, on the other hand, was planned far in advance. He was the first concept I wrote a profile for and the first that existed in a stage that was more than a basic, single-sentence idea or unelaborated name.
The concept of Lex was inspired by what I had read; Garren Mortimer and Demetri Futscher from Version 7. In particular, I drew on Demetri's appearance for inspiration.
Where he differs from the two of them, I feel, is his tone and attitude. As anyone who has read Lex in detail can attest, his narrative is sparse and incredibly cagey, in steep contrast to the longer, more detailed stories that Pip and Cicada wonderfully weaved. I also feel his tone is far more humorless and dour as a result.
More I cannot at this time reveal, but I will say that I'm having a blast writing him.
Noah Davis is, in my view, an example of how setbacks can ultimately lead to a better result. He was the last of several concepts that I created for the first iteration of Supers. In another world, he would never have existed. I had two other well-developed characters that I planned to apply; I discarded the first due to my lack of confidence in his subject matter, and the second due to the arena's location.
Ultimately, I felt amused by the idea of a character who had literal finger guns; from there, the concept spiraled into reality. In the end, I had so many ideas for Noah that I wrote a full-size profile in four hours in a spell of what I can only describe as single-minded inspiration and subsequently had to take an ax to a significant portion of it.
In the end, I'm glad it happened that way. I like him a lot and look forward to a bright future with him.
I was, however, persuaded by Lore to write a character, ostensibly for practice. I conceived the concept and wrote the profile in a matter of hours. He, as a character, was designed in a way that would solve two problems; how to justify his relative absence from pregame and how to get the most educational experience possible in SOTF.
As a result, I designed Cory as an intentionally rudimentary and isolated character; with almost no friends and an open-ended personality, I gave myself room to breathe and explore my options. From there, he crystallized into the person he would remain throughout the game.
I am ultimately glad to have participated in TV3, and my greatest regret for that version will be not submitting a second character.
Alexander "Lex" Latimer, on the other hand, was planned far in advance. He was the first concept I wrote a profile for and the first that existed in a stage that was more than a basic, single-sentence idea or unelaborated name.
The concept of Lex was inspired by what I had read; Garren Mortimer and Demetri Futscher from Version 7. In particular, I drew on Demetri's appearance for inspiration.
Where he differs from the two of them, I feel, is his tone and attitude. As anyone who has read Lex in detail can attest, his narrative is sparse and incredibly cagey, in steep contrast to the longer, more detailed stories that Pip and Cicada wonderfully weaved. I also feel his tone is far more humorless and dour as a result.
More I cannot at this time reveal, but I will say that I'm having a blast writing him.
Noah Davis is, in my view, an example of how setbacks can ultimately lead to a better result. He was the last of several concepts that I created for the first iteration of Supers. In another world, he would never have existed. I had two other well-developed characters that I planned to apply; I discarded the first due to my lack of confidence in his subject matter, and the second due to the arena's location.
Ultimately, I felt amused by the idea of a character who had literal finger guns; from there, the concept spiraled into reality. In the end, I had so many ideas for Noah that I wrote a full-size profile in four hours in a spell of what I can only describe as single-minded inspiration and subsequently had to take an ax to a significant portion of it.
In the end, I'm glad it happened that way. I like him a lot and look forward to a bright future with him.
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MurderWeasel
- Posts: 3442
- Joined: Mon Aug 06, 2018 9:56 am
- Team Affiliation: Jewel's Leviathans
And, everyone since last time:
William Lohman (SC2) and Richard Ormsby (SC2) were picked as characters who did little but who I also wasn't super invested in the original iterations of. I wanted fairly blank slates for my nefarious purposes (killing my whole cast immediately) and Virtua characters fit the bill because they had a driving point of conflict (Richard being a bully) and also were less real to me in their first times around (Virtua being a version I struggled with).
Mina Mashall was built around a couple things, but her core came from some frustration I had with people who, with all noble intentions, botched their attempts to be allies by over-inserting themselves into other people's struggles and co-opting them. Thus, her rebel-without-a-clue persona—she comes from a privileged background and can see enough to push against the bad stuff, but not enough to actually shake off her own prejudices in a functional way, at least before the game. Also, because of Prologue's specific concept, I gave her a lot of slower-burn stuff and leaned super hard on a lot of my favorite themes and such—Mina's kind of intended as a break point/exorcism of some ideas I was done with and didn't use as much afterwards.
Erik Bell you probably don't remember, since he got a profile but missed the game. Believe it or not, that was always the plan... from a certain point of view. He was going to be part of a very weird plotline and primarily appear in it posthumously, but this involved a bunch of coordination that fell through last second. His profile was all tied to this, though, and specifically towards giving him some really prominent behaviors that would then be absent when he wasn't actually literally there.
Maribel Bay was created to job to Grant and everything about her I made up on the fly. I think she was a runner or something? Dunno. Can't remember.
Morton Bishop borrowed some traits I find especially odious and played them up more for laughs. Kinda a soft do-over on Austin with the real core nastiness stripped out; Morton was more the pathetic bully flavor of malicious. Mostly it worked out, but he was the less fun so when it was Hero time early on he got the axe.
Sofia Chiles is built around (and named for) a collection of famous folk ballads and was pretty much an excuse to play a character who was kinda genre-heavy in a genre nobody else cares about at all. She's full of references to old folk songs and such, which is one of my big music genres of interest, and takes from this a pretty active/assertive narrative role so that she wouldn't be boring to write.
Keegan Garcia is the midpoint of some stuff I used to be super into and some stuff from my middle school friend group. Lots of details stolen from me or people I know—the coat's mine, and the hot sauce was barbecue sauce but I wasn't gonna drink barbecue sauce to describe it properly so I changed it to something I like. His drifting aimlessness is something a lot of people I was once close to went through at various points. He was shaped further by The Respects, which I pretty much randomly clicked a link and then hung out for.
Mandy Gross was built from the ground up as Seo-yun's accomplice. Originally, I had a very different character slated for the role (and in fact solicited Seo-yun as accomplice to that character), but after TV2 I shifted gears some and didn't have the emotional or creative energy to do full plan in a way that'd do it justice, so I decided to swerve to a hard support character for Seo-yun instead. Mandy's Disneybounding came from a prompt Kami gave me and ended up pretty heavily influencing her vibe—Mandy's kinda a Disney henchman in a way, there to hype up the real villain while being sneaky and difficult in her own right.
Leander Van Vliet basically came from me not being super confident in my abilities re: representing a culture I haven't experienced at all and being late to the party for country claims. Thus, he's the kid of a Western expat with dubious paramilitary ties—something a lot closer to home for me! For vibes, I tried to channel a little from Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner, a song about European mercenaries finding work in Africa. His surname is borrowed from Captain Beefheart, as is some of his vibe re: teamwork (specifically, he's awful at it). The original plan was to make a character who desperately needed allies to be comfortable but was also flatly incapable of treating them well or functioning properly as a leader. Then he got a snipe rifle and I decided it was more fun to thread with people from half a kilometer away. He got rolled before he could destroy his reputation and alienate Jen.
Yvette Monday was built entirely around her power, which was in turn built around lots of Supers being body horror. I went "Well, then I'm gonna write someone who dies like a cheap 4Kids anime censor circa 1998." Then I just kept asking questions about the power and answering them and building around that. She ended up super duper detached from humanity and different from other people (oh hey look it's my favorite theme again) and I doubled down on that.
Think that's everyone?
William Lohman (SC2) and Richard Ormsby (SC2) were picked as characters who did little but who I also wasn't super invested in the original iterations of. I wanted fairly blank slates for my nefarious purposes (killing my whole cast immediately) and Virtua characters fit the bill because they had a driving point of conflict (Richard being a bully) and also were less real to me in their first times around (Virtua being a version I struggled with).
Mina Mashall was built around a couple things, but her core came from some frustration I had with people who, with all noble intentions, botched their attempts to be allies by over-inserting themselves into other people's struggles and co-opting them. Thus, her rebel-without-a-clue persona—she comes from a privileged background and can see enough to push against the bad stuff, but not enough to actually shake off her own prejudices in a functional way, at least before the game. Also, because of Prologue's specific concept, I gave her a lot of slower-burn stuff and leaned super hard on a lot of my favorite themes and such—Mina's kind of intended as a break point/exorcism of some ideas I was done with and didn't use as much afterwards.
Erik Bell you probably don't remember, since he got a profile but missed the game. Believe it or not, that was always the plan... from a certain point of view. He was going to be part of a very weird plotline and primarily appear in it posthumously, but this involved a bunch of coordination that fell through last second. His profile was all tied to this, though, and specifically towards giving him some really prominent behaviors that would then be absent when he wasn't actually literally there.
Maribel Bay was created to job to Grant and everything about her I made up on the fly. I think she was a runner or something? Dunno. Can't remember.
Morton Bishop borrowed some traits I find especially odious and played them up more for laughs. Kinda a soft do-over on Austin with the real core nastiness stripped out; Morton was more the pathetic bully flavor of malicious. Mostly it worked out, but he was the less fun so when it was Hero time early on he got the axe.
Sofia Chiles is built around (and named for) a collection of famous folk ballads and was pretty much an excuse to play a character who was kinda genre-heavy in a genre nobody else cares about at all. She's full of references to old folk songs and such, which is one of my big music genres of interest, and takes from this a pretty active/assertive narrative role so that she wouldn't be boring to write.
Keegan Garcia is the midpoint of some stuff I used to be super into and some stuff from my middle school friend group. Lots of details stolen from me or people I know—the coat's mine, and the hot sauce was barbecue sauce but I wasn't gonna drink barbecue sauce to describe it properly so I changed it to something I like. His drifting aimlessness is something a lot of people I was once close to went through at various points. He was shaped further by The Respects, which I pretty much randomly clicked a link and then hung out for.
Mandy Gross was built from the ground up as Seo-yun's accomplice. Originally, I had a very different character slated for the role (and in fact solicited Seo-yun as accomplice to that character), but after TV2 I shifted gears some and didn't have the emotional or creative energy to do full plan in a way that'd do it justice, so I decided to swerve to a hard support character for Seo-yun instead. Mandy's Disneybounding came from a prompt Kami gave me and ended up pretty heavily influencing her vibe—Mandy's kinda a Disney henchman in a way, there to hype up the real villain while being sneaky and difficult in her own right.
Leander Van Vliet basically came from me not being super confident in my abilities re: representing a culture I haven't experienced at all and being late to the party for country claims. Thus, he's the kid of a Western expat with dubious paramilitary ties—something a lot closer to home for me! For vibes, I tried to channel a little from Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner, a song about European mercenaries finding work in Africa. His surname is borrowed from Captain Beefheart, as is some of his vibe re: teamwork (specifically, he's awful at it). The original plan was to make a character who desperately needed allies to be comfortable but was also flatly incapable of treating them well or functioning properly as a leader. Then he got a snipe rifle and I decided it was more fun to thread with people from half a kilometer away. He got rolled before he could destroy his reputation and alienate Jen.
Yvette Monday was built entirely around her power, which was in turn built around lots of Supers being body horror. I went "Well, then I'm gonna write someone who dies like a cheap 4Kids anime censor circa 1998." Then I just kept asking questions about the power and answering them and building around that. She ended up super duper detached from humanity and different from other people (oh hey look it's my favorite theme again) and I doubled down on that.
Think that's everyone?
With my first four characters, a lot of their concepts were designed around illustrating and engaging with the settings that they inhabited. I wanted to demonstrate what types of people you might find in the Program and TV universes. Essentially, I was trying to ensure that there was at least some population that had setting unique traits and give some examples to other handlers if they were trying to get a feel for things. (Not like, trying to be THE BEST CHARACTERS THAT EVERYONE MUST ASPIRE TOWARDS, just a blueprint of sorts).
Tyler Blake (Program V1):
"Hey wanna see how hard I can break this guy?"
With Tyler I wanted to look at transplanting an all-american type of guy, the good looking sports dude who is completely good natured and friendly to everyone, into a setting that just wholly doesn't work with that. He belongs to a different America than Program America and that's where he comes from almost in his entirety, depicting how his all-american boyness is completely incompatible with the space he exists in.
Also he is modelled in appearance entirely off of a TEW character.
Marilyn Williams (Program V1):
"This is how much it sucks to be a POC in Programerica"
I don't really have a lot to say otherwise. I probably went overboard. I bullied Marilyn a lot. I did also want to see if I could depict a stammer decently well without being caricature/too annoying. (I have not yet reread Marilyn. I may have missed the mark).
Natalie Chauncey (TV1):
With Nate I wanted to make an outcast character who had a pronounced creative streak and throw her into a situation that she was 0% equipped to handle, and also engage with the SOTF-TV setting uhhh opposite to normal. That is, okay TV is pervasive, so what does somebody who knows nothing about TV look like in this kind of setting? A good amount of inspiration was considering that specific question and extrapolating from there. I wouldn't have described it like this, but worldbuilding via negative space.
Tristan Hart (TV1):
Speaking of negative space, Tristan was the opposite of Nate and knew tons about TV, but it's flipped around from the norm by him being an anti-TV activist rather than a superfan. I expected that we wouldn't really see much of the anti-SOTF side of things, so I thought it would be a nice niche to explore with the guy.
Clarisse Huntingdon (Virtua):
She's almost what she says on the tin. I had the concept of somebody who'd been damaged by trauma both physical and mental and was already off rails and struggling, and you see that right in the profile. At a slightly deeper level, I thought it would be interesting to put in a character who had kind of already gone to her high point and then come crashing down. Talk about peaking in high school.
Oswald "Oz" Stevenson (Virtua):
NGL I kind of think I picked 'loner' and 'ice skater' out of a hat and smushed them together until I had a profile.
Tyler Blake (Program V1):
"Hey wanna see how hard I can break this guy?"
With Tyler I wanted to look at transplanting an all-american type of guy, the good looking sports dude who is completely good natured and friendly to everyone, into a setting that just wholly doesn't work with that. He belongs to a different America than Program America and that's where he comes from almost in his entirety, depicting how his all-american boyness is completely incompatible with the space he exists in.
Also he is modelled in appearance entirely off of a TEW character.
Marilyn Williams (Program V1):
"This is how much it sucks to be a POC in Programerica"
I don't really have a lot to say otherwise. I probably went overboard. I bullied Marilyn a lot. I did also want to see if I could depict a stammer decently well without being caricature/too annoying. (I have not yet reread Marilyn. I may have missed the mark).
Natalie Chauncey (TV1):
With Nate I wanted to make an outcast character who had a pronounced creative streak and throw her into a situation that she was 0% equipped to handle, and also engage with the SOTF-TV setting uhhh opposite to normal. That is, okay TV is pervasive, so what does somebody who knows nothing about TV look like in this kind of setting? A good amount of inspiration was considering that specific question and extrapolating from there. I wouldn't have described it like this, but worldbuilding via negative space.
Tristan Hart (TV1):
Speaking of negative space, Tristan was the opposite of Nate and knew tons about TV, but it's flipped around from the norm by him being an anti-TV activist rather than a superfan. I expected that we wouldn't really see much of the anti-SOTF side of things, so I thought it would be a nice niche to explore with the guy.
Clarisse Huntingdon (Virtua):
She's almost what she says on the tin. I had the concept of somebody who'd been damaged by trauma both physical and mental and was already off rails and struggling, and you see that right in the profile. At a slightly deeper level, I thought it would be interesting to put in a character who had kind of already gone to her high point and then come crashing down. Talk about peaking in high school.
Oswald "Oz" Stevenson (Virtua):
NGL I kind of think I picked 'loner' and 'ice skater' out of a hat and smushed them together until I had a profile.
OK so recent to oldest, one by one: Melodie is incredibly complicated inspirational-wise but a huge thing I was inspired by was Pathologic 2, in terms of a. meta-ness and b. the use of physicality as a way to portray very mental horror. Her entire personality was also built to foil Leah in a way, except I left a lot of gaps that are incredubly obviously sinister. I wanted her to be a character liable to snap, with the potential to be absolutely horrible- she's not a good person. She could be the absolute fucking worst. She makes people uncomfortable. She's meant to push boundaries. I took advantage of the fact that BR and the such is real and canon in supers and I turned that into a huge part of her.
Fun fact: She was inspired by, amongst other things, Genshin impact. No, I'm not kidding. I could talk a lot about how the fucking, like, Raiden Shogun's rejection of the body/view of death etc was linked to the Gift of generating biological tissue or whatever but the truth is I just think her hair is very pretty so I stole it. And also, major inspirations for her writing style include trying to one up Kermit in terms of pretentiousness, Disco Elysium, and the SCP foundation, as well as oblique references to a lot of alternative superhero media that I actually don't know about.
What I aim to achieve with Melodie is honestly to highlight the connection of writer and character, of unreality and the process behind us writing our characters and the thought we put behind them. And she really shouldn't be taken at face value- like it becomes clear pretty easily that she's communicating with the author and existing in a space that, in Supers, doesnt exist. And it will become worse.
Fun fact: She was inspired by, amongst other things, Genshin impact. No, I'm not kidding. I could talk a lot about how the fucking, like, Raiden Shogun's rejection of the body/view of death etc was linked to the Gift of generating biological tissue or whatever but the truth is I just think her hair is very pretty so I stole it. And also, major inspirations for her writing style include trying to one up Kermit in terms of pretentiousness, Disco Elysium, and the SCP foundation, as well as oblique references to a lot of alternative superhero media that I actually don't know about.
What I aim to achieve with Melodie is honestly to highlight the connection of writer and character, of unreality and the process behind us writing our characters and the thought we put behind them. And she really shouldn't be taken at face value- like it becomes clear pretty easily that she's communicating with the author and existing in a space that, in Supers, doesnt exist. And it will become worse.
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Catche Jagger
- Posts: 743
- Joined: Tue May 28, 2019 7:40 pm
- Team Affiliation: Ben's Crabs
James Highchurch (TV3): This is kind of a long one. James sat in my head for a long time and changed a lot while in the oven. Initially, he was meant to be sort of an ineffectual villain type, a rich kid that thought he was the hottest shit around and knew everything about SOTF, but his time in the game would be marked by increasingly desperate attempts to become a sort of power player, most (if not all) of which would fail horribly.
However, as he got incorporated into the Respects concept, this started to shift to this idea because I wanted him to be someone that would inherently create conflict in the group, so the idea moved towards being someone that be a bit more of a social player, being sort of a cowardly Starscream-type, someone that was really there to hide behind the other members and kind of try to weasel his way into a spot of authority. The idea of him being kind of a fuckboy showed up in this middle incarnation.
But then, I looked into the other characters in the group and realized that everyone was gonna be some big SOTF fan (didn't know what RC's character was going to be at the time), so I thought a more interesting source of conflict would be that he was the one guy in the group that really didn't give a shit about SOTF before getting taken. However, if that was going to be the angle, then he couldn't be this sort of gung-ho figure, so his conflict would lean more on the fact that he didn't really work within the context of a group of players, but was too scared/wishy-washy to ever truly break from the group. And so the fuckboy thing became another facet of him being sort of approval-seeking and unable to commit to decisive action, etc.
Gabriela Garcia-Campos (TV3): Gabriela was a slapdash replacement for my previous 2nd concept for TV3, since other events led to me deciding to drop that one. Gabriela was meant to be sort of an opposing mirror to James, being someone that seemed likely to play and would start off the game acting like a player, but who would end up not killing anyone. Other character traits were sort of a take on Kurisu from Steins;Gate, being a scientificly minded girl that is too online and has a strained relationship with her father.
The relationship with Elliott-Blair was relatively spontaneous, based on me needing to find some relationships for Gabriela and seeing a character with some shared interests without a whole bunch of sandbox under their belt. The whole thing of Gabriela and Elliott's dynamic in the game wasn't planned until after the Prologue dropped and revealed the transfer rule.
Archibald Harper (INTL): I just wanted to hang out and write a nice guy. The TV3 writing had been pretty taxing so I decided to write something a bit easier in International, with a guy that would just generally try to do some good, maybe do some escape-adjacent stuff, and possibly play on some V1-isms along the way. Pretty simple stuff.
Alan Melnyk (Supers): I was going to do a guy with a very simple but very shitty power, namely just having a beak, but had some concerns about stepping on toes from other ideas I'd hear of. Then I saw this Beetlejuice animatic and decided I needed to do a Gift that would likely require making deals, or working with other folks to make it work, and having a character that was kind of shifty doing the deal-making.
However, as he got incorporated into the Respects concept, this started to shift to this idea because I wanted him to be someone that would inherently create conflict in the group, so the idea moved towards being someone that be a bit more of a social player, being sort of a cowardly Starscream-type, someone that was really there to hide behind the other members and kind of try to weasel his way into a spot of authority. The idea of him being kind of a fuckboy showed up in this middle incarnation.
But then, I looked into the other characters in the group and realized that everyone was gonna be some big SOTF fan (didn't know what RC's character was going to be at the time), so I thought a more interesting source of conflict would be that he was the one guy in the group that really didn't give a shit about SOTF before getting taken. However, if that was going to be the angle, then he couldn't be this sort of gung-ho figure, so his conflict would lean more on the fact that he didn't really work within the context of a group of players, but was too scared/wishy-washy to ever truly break from the group. And so the fuckboy thing became another facet of him being sort of approval-seeking and unable to commit to decisive action, etc.
Gabriela Garcia-Campos (TV3): Gabriela was a slapdash replacement for my previous 2nd concept for TV3, since other events led to me deciding to drop that one. Gabriela was meant to be sort of an opposing mirror to James, being someone that seemed likely to play and would start off the game acting like a player, but who would end up not killing anyone. Other character traits were sort of a take on Kurisu from Steins;Gate, being a scientificly minded girl that is too online and has a strained relationship with her father.
The relationship with Elliott-Blair was relatively spontaneous, based on me needing to find some relationships for Gabriela and seeing a character with some shared interests without a whole bunch of sandbox under their belt. The whole thing of Gabriela and Elliott's dynamic in the game wasn't planned until after the Prologue dropped and revealed the transfer rule.
Archibald Harper (INTL): I just wanted to hang out and write a nice guy. The TV3 writing had been pretty taxing so I decided to write something a bit easier in International, with a guy that would just generally try to do some good, maybe do some escape-adjacent stuff, and possibly play on some V1-isms along the way. Pretty simple stuff.
Alan Melnyk (Supers): I was going to do a guy with a very simple but very shitty power, namely just having a beak, but had some concerns about stepping on toes from other ideas I'd hear of. Then I saw this Beetlejuice animatic and decided I needed to do a Gift that would likely require making deals, or working with other folks to make it work, and having a character that was kind of shifty doing the deal-making.
The first draft of the character who eventually became Cecilia was written for a Battle Royale game that never happened back when I was in university, almost ten years ago. She had a different name and didn't have a super power. She was a timid quiet Hispanic girl who was never going to fight directly, but would instead find a location and just start rigging up traps to deter anybody who came near. (I was working as a set builder for the drama department at the time, so I did actually construct several of the rigs I'd come up with, just to make sure that they'd actually work as I envisioned them.)
I didn't get to use the character, so I kept her in a sketchbook of ideas, and attempted to resurrect her as a main character in a BR fic that I started writing in 2015 when I was working as a valet attendant and had to spend hours and hours sitting in a booth with nothing to do. This was around the time that the Republican primaries were happening, so I actually started writing the fic as what I thought would be an alternate history piece about a president who would never, ever be elected in reality. "Imagine a fucked-up world where a guy like Donald Trump becomes the president, and starts taking immigrant kids away from their families and throwing them into a death game."
The actual results of the 2016 election more or less killed off the fic for good. I was absolutely horrified a few years later when immigrant family separations, almost exactly like the ones I'd been writing about, started taking place in reality.
When it came time to design a character for Supers, I went through a lot of ideas, and eventually decided that Cecilia was the best fit for what I wanted to write about. I was coming in late, so I wanted to write a character who had a valid reason for not showing up in anybody else's memories or school experience up to that point, and I figured a quiet wallflower sort of character would fit the bill nicely. I almost didn't make Cecilia an immigrant because I knew it was a weighty topic and one that probably still has the capacity to be controversial for people. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought it was something worth exploring. Almost every character I write has something going on that I want to unpack and tease out psychologically. In Cecilia's case, I wanted to look at what that separation experience would do to a person, and what it'd be like to go through that kind of trauma and come out the other side, and then try to live an ordinary life while balancing all of that fear and anger.
And I wanted, in my own way, to provide something that would help people not to forget, and to kind of humanize the events that have been going on at the border. I think it's easy to think of these things in the abstract, and I thought it'd be meaningful to try and crystallize them a bit.
I didn't get to use the character, so I kept her in a sketchbook of ideas, and attempted to resurrect her as a main character in a BR fic that I started writing in 2015 when I was working as a valet attendant and had to spend hours and hours sitting in a booth with nothing to do. This was around the time that the Republican primaries were happening, so I actually started writing the fic as what I thought would be an alternate history piece about a president who would never, ever be elected in reality. "Imagine a fucked-up world where a guy like Donald Trump becomes the president, and starts taking immigrant kids away from their families and throwing them into a death game."
The actual results of the 2016 election more or less killed off the fic for good. I was absolutely horrified a few years later when immigrant family separations, almost exactly like the ones I'd been writing about, started taking place in reality.
When it came time to design a character for Supers, I went through a lot of ideas, and eventually decided that Cecilia was the best fit for what I wanted to write about. I was coming in late, so I wanted to write a character who had a valid reason for not showing up in anybody else's memories or school experience up to that point, and I figured a quiet wallflower sort of character would fit the bill nicely. I almost didn't make Cecilia an immigrant because I knew it was a weighty topic and one that probably still has the capacity to be controversial for people. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought it was something worth exploring. Almost every character I write has something going on that I want to unpack and tease out psychologically. In Cecilia's case, I wanted to look at what that separation experience would do to a person, and what it'd be like to go through that kind of trauma and come out the other side, and then try to live an ordinary life while balancing all of that fear and anger.
And I wanted, in my own way, to provide something that would help people not to forget, and to kind of humanize the events that have been going on at the border. I think it's easy to think of these things in the abstract, and I thought it'd be meaningful to try and crystallize them a bit.
all my characters WERE A MISTAKE
Upcoming:
Second Chances V3 (deconreconfirmed):
Relations Thread!
Olivia Fischer (original handler, Maraoone)
Memories: 1 Pregame: 1
Faith Marshal-Mackenzie (original handler, Frozen Smoke)
Memories: 1 Pregame: 1
Sayuna Lewis (original handler, Cicada)
Princess McQuillan (original handler, Cicada)
Pregame: 1
Second Chances V3 (deconreconfirmed):
Relations Thread!
Olivia Fischer (original handler, Maraoone)
Memories: 1 Pregame: 1
Faith Marshal-Mackenzie (original handler, Frozen Smoke)
Memories: 1 Pregame: 1
Sayuna Lewis (original handler, Cicada)
Princess McQuillan (original handler, Cicada)
Pregame: 1
All my characters are 80’s movie goons.
However, the idea of the Respects came out of spite from my incessant seething of being treated like trash in v7. Teal dear: people got me involved in their storylines, and heavily impacted mine, then basically ghosted me from theirs when they didn’t need me anymore, leaving my stories with basically no conclusion beyond what I could frankenstein together with what little I had, and on top of that, some shady sneaky shit that almost made me quit sotf outright. Twas a bad time.
I went into tv3 as a last gasp. Death or glory. Either gonna be my last version or my best, though either way I’m not gonna be made irrelevant, Ima sink my toxic waste mutated tentacles as far across the game as I could. But I wasn’t gonna repeat what happened to me, it wouldn’t have made me feel better, would’ve pissed a lot of people, and nothing would’ve changed.
The respects formed from me just branching out to do something new (large scale player gank squads are the perfect opportunity to do that, it’s new, it’s big, the potential for branching paths is massive, and it’s intimidating enough you can’t ignore it ic, or ooc for that matter with how many people we intimidated after trussing up Ivan day 1 LMFAO) and I roped a bunch of likeminded people into it, and it snowballed into something massive, which I’m all for, as complexity addiction fetish is my middle name.
Imo id say it was a success, I got to sink my tentacles into as many stories as possible, didn’t have to screw over anyone to do it, and more so had the most fun I’ve had on this site since I started. Best part is we got to do all sorts of shit that you won’t see in another version, and got as many people as possible involved with that shit too.
Really the best part is all the people I threaded with to get to do all these crazy ass scenes. You couldn’t do any of this with oneshots, or two people or even four. In the end I didn’t really do all that much besides grab a bunch of people who felt the same way or just wanted to have fun and just say, hey this is new, this is big let’s fucking send it. Without all the people who helped me set this up, none of this would’ve been possible, and I probably wouldn’t be here to talk about it;
So from the bottom of my heart, I am really sincere, and I really mean it when I say thank you for helping me make this work. I appreciate all of y’all. From the Respects themselves, to their enemies, to everyone else who tolerated my bs, I appreciate all of you.
Shit was fun.
However, the idea of the Respects came out of spite from my incessant seething of being treated like trash in v7. Teal dear: people got me involved in their storylines, and heavily impacted mine, then basically ghosted me from theirs when they didn’t need me anymore, leaving my stories with basically no conclusion beyond what I could frankenstein together with what little I had, and on top of that, some shady sneaky shit that almost made me quit sotf outright. Twas a bad time.
I went into tv3 as a last gasp. Death or glory. Either gonna be my last version or my best, though either way I’m not gonna be made irrelevant, Ima sink my toxic waste mutated tentacles as far across the game as I could. But I wasn’t gonna repeat what happened to me, it wouldn’t have made me feel better, would’ve pissed a lot of people, and nothing would’ve changed.
The respects formed from me just branching out to do something new (large scale player gank squads are the perfect opportunity to do that, it’s new, it’s big, the potential for branching paths is massive, and it’s intimidating enough you can’t ignore it ic, or ooc for that matter with how many people we intimidated after trussing up Ivan day 1 LMFAO) and I roped a bunch of likeminded people into it, and it snowballed into something massive, which I’m all for, as complexity addiction fetish is my middle name.
Imo id say it was a success, I got to sink my tentacles into as many stories as possible, didn’t have to screw over anyone to do it, and more so had the most fun I’ve had on this site since I started. Best part is we got to do all sorts of shit that you won’t see in another version, and got as many people as possible involved with that shit too.
Really the best part is all the people I threaded with to get to do all these crazy ass scenes. You couldn’t do any of this with oneshots, or two people or even four. In the end I didn’t really do all that much besides grab a bunch of people who felt the same way or just wanted to have fun and just say, hey this is new, this is big let’s fucking send it. Without all the people who helped me set this up, none of this would’ve been possible, and I probably wouldn’t be here to talk about it;
So from the bottom of my heart, I am really sincere, and I really mean it when I say thank you for helping me make this work. I appreciate all of y’all. From the Respects themselves, to their enemies, to everyone else who tolerated my bs, I appreciate all of you.
Shit was fun.
Catche thinks my squirrel is Fisk so here's my daily reminder that he is not.
I don’t feel like copy-pasting what I said years ago or re-writing it, so here are the kids I haven’t explained yet:
Felicia LaChapelle- I’ve explained this one before, actually. Felicia is me playing around with the ‘hot hypersexualized teen girl’ trope that was common in earlier versions! My premise for her was to write such a character, but make her more nuanced. For one, her actual level of experience is vastly played up by other people, so she’s experienced, but not that experienced. I also wanted to make her a sex-positive feminist to make her able to explain sexual issues on an ideological and ethical level, which, combined with the Program setting, made her more politically conscious. She’s essentially the closest Program equivalent of what a left-leaning progressive would look like. She still has her moments of iffiness as a result of being in the Programverse USA and general privilege stuff, but for the most part she’s a lefty. The name came from an April Fool’s Day prank where I pretended to replace my V5 cast with parodies of infamous rejected characters, with the ‘Felicia’ in that post being a riff on Krilacia Flameaux, an overly promiscuous French girl submitted but not approved to V5 pregame. In retrospect (and this is something I’ve confessed to before!) she ended up incorporating traits of that character but a more improved version if that makes sense?
Bella Bianchi- Bella started as a concept for Virtua before I decided she was a better fit for TV Land thematically. I don’t remember why specifically I wanted to write a character with her background, but I do remember cycling through different things. For one, it was originally opera instead of ballet/acting. I think in a lot of ways I wanted to write an effed-up home dynamic and explore the consequences of that. After I moved Bella into TV, I kind of intended her to be a bit of a bait-and-switch at first: everything about her pre-game and profile would point towards her being a damsel-in-distress type, but in-game not only would she be more proactive but a full-on antagonist.
In some ways, Bella in TV was intended to be a poke at the more horrifying TV stuff. At the time, TV1 was seen as more goofy and campy, for better or worse. However, it did come up that TV also provides a certain sense of existential horror in that these are kids dying on live television for entertainment. Bella was written in a way to play into that fact. Additionally, she was going to be a mixture of my two least favorite SOTF villain archetypes at the time which are also two of my favorite villain archetypes overall: the anti-villain and the snapcase. I have a whole TED talk about both, but basically: my beef with anti-villains is that historically it’s been misused to mean ‘this villain has kinda sympathetic traits that prevent them from being a total monster’, and handlers would say misinterpret it as ‘my character kinda feels bad about killing people and has some pitiable/likeable traits’ when they’re objectively pretty awful. My problem with snapcases is that, when a character snaps, they’re most of the time less interesting than before they did, and people historically have used a snap to do more gimmicky stuff like ‘my character is a cook, so that means they’ll cook human flesh, right?’ So, I wanted to combine the two. I set Bella up to snap, but I wanted to make her legitimately sympathetic and, well, actually an anti-villain. So, while she did have some trauma and angst, I wanted to make sure that she actually has some clear ethics, moral boundaries and noble traits that could feasibly make her more grey than other hypothetical villains (ex. She’d kill someone for one reason, but not the other, or that she’s willing to help out more heroic characters). In a lot of ways, she was intended to be a character who could see being a more ‘heroic’ type, but a bad draw meant she’s now a villain. For the snap-case part, I was aiming more in the direction of ‘psychological horror protagonist’ than ‘slasher villain’; she’s less a feared force of nature than a main character you get the see the madness unfold from their perspective and worry for their mental health the entire time.
Bella was also intended to be part of a villain duo with Rocky’s Shadi! Shadi was basically intended to be a revisit of Ashlie from Evo, so Rocky was like ‘hey, I want to do a Bonnie and Clyde-esque thing in TV, wanna join me?’ and I was like, ‘sure.’ The tldr is that Bella and Shadi were this queer-coded player duo, where Shadi is the more emotionally stable but less moral of the two and Bella is the more moral but less stable of the two. Shadi would have been basically like ‘hey, I like you and will kill you last, wanna get all corrupted and kill all these losers with me?’ and Bella was like ‘you’re evil and I’m losing it and kinda gay so.’ But Rocky got banned, Shadi was inactive-killed, and Bella’s character arc went in the direction it went.
I’ve said I would like to use Bella in a hypothetical SC3, since I feel she was underutilized in TV2. She barely had any pre-game and didn’t do as much as I’d like in-game, which sucked because I went into TV2 like ‘I had fun in TV1, but I wanna do more story things this time around’. So, Bella is one of personal picks for that. Maybe some of this stuff will come back, maybe it won’t, who knows?
Nina Riddhi- Nina was kind of a counterpoint to Bella. While Bella was intended to play into the darker aspects of TV’s setting, Nina was intended to be the sort of character who could do more goofy TV stuff while still having some dramatic beats (since I had fun with the goofy TV stuff in TV1!). Confession time: one of my least favorite character archetypes when I first joined the site was the ‘party girl type’, and while I had cooled down about it by the time TV2 came around, I still wanted to take a shot at a character type I tended to dislike. I took some inspiration from Kesha’s and Miley Cyrus’ stage persona at the time, until I hit a significant snag while writing her profile.
I paid attention to the timeline, and realized that Nina’s behavior is much more worrying than I initially thought, because it meant that she could be drinking and partying as young as 14. I thought about it, and went ‘yeah, plot point time’, which resulted in her final version of her actually trying to clean up her act by the time pre-game starts. This was actually a good thing, because I already had an idea of what her in-game arc would be. I wanted to write her as a camwhore, but I fthought it’d be fun to write one who plays into the hero role rather than the villain role. Which eventually became the whole ‘I’m going to go around and do nice things for people out of spite’ thing, which was long pre-planned before that oneshot came up.
Charlie Pemberton- Here I go playing with tropes again. As I’ve stated before, Charlie is intended to have a lot of ‘pre-made player’ traits but re-contextualized in a way that isn’t pre-made-y at all. So basically, she has a working class-esque background, her family’s business is one with negative connotations, she's a tall and muscular loner type, and also has undiagnosed mental illness. But she’s one character I emphatically told myself was never going to get a kill for any reason, nor does she have any actual violent tendencies. I also wanted her to deal with intrusive thoughts centered around violence, and I admittedly wrote her around the symptoms of ”pure o” OCD with the thoughts mainly centered around harming others on accident or on purpose. I wanted to explore the idea that having dark thoughts doesn’t mean you’ll actually do those things or have actual violent tendencies. Then Program V3 was going to have a Programlogue, I adjusted her accordingly, and slotted her into the Dogtown group.
Anneliese O’Doyle- This one is fairly straightforward. I mentioned in chat that I wanted to write a Mitsuklone, Brinkie messaged me and said ‘hey, wanna do the Megumi scene with Nani but your NPC girl dies instead?’ and I was like ‘sure.’ Anneliese is based more on the film version in psychology, but for different reasons. But yeah, she’s a Mitsuko Souma homage.
Phoebe Quincey- Again, pretty straightforward! She’s a mixture of Anna Chase from V4 and Emma Luz from V6. She got some of her darkly-inclined traits from Chase, while her being an academic type with a student government position came from Emma. Both Emma and Chase I had issues with due to their archetypes, so I thought ‘third time’s the charm.’ Her doggo was inspired by the Scott meme, while I took the suggestion of naming said doggo ‘Pippi’ after the handler. Then the bee/wasp thing happened.
Mary Cheung- Mary is… a lot of things.
First off, as I’ve stated before, she’s kinda based on my own history of mental illness and neurodivergence. It’s not an exact one-to-one; for one, Mary’s much more extroverted and social. But some parts of her stuff are autobiological in nature. While there were times I was triggered while writing her, I do find it a therapeutic type of triggering, if that makes sense? Also, I wanted to write a neurodivergent character I personally could relate to in terms of depiction. In some ways, she can be a shitty person in ways I can also be shitty.
Additionally, she’s also based off me, once again, exploring tropes. In Mary’s case, a lot of stuff surrounding her is intended to be me using edgy and/or wish fulfillment tropes on purpose as a way of stealthily critiquing them. If you oversimplify her enough, she becomes a mean girl-esque party type with modelesque looks and a focus on fashion and beauty who also has some sexualized elements and comes from a privileged background that also deals with very specific ideological stuff, and is custom-made to create backstory/pre-game drama. But, I wanted to explore the actual circumstances, consequences, and realistic-but-still-unexpected elements of those things. As an example, the one clinic flashback was me having fun touching on a rarely addressed issue with being sexually active; originally it was going to be just 'Mary goes to a regular appointment for birth control', but then I realized I could make it worse. Also, I was always going to have Jie react to her pre-game antics, it just took me a while. But, at her core, Mary’s concept was basically ‘what if instead of being this mean girl bully who is popular despite that, she’s a deeply troubled emotionally needy class clown person who is a potential bully target herself?’
I also wanted to make her a bit on the camp side, not necessarily narratively but more in personality. I also decided to give her a bit of an MPDG vibe, on top of it. This explains a lot of the not-depressed sides of her characterization: she’s supposed to be a completely extra, flamboyant, theatrical person in general. Hence why #aesthetic is a thing I mention in relation to her a lot, and why she’s the sort of person who’d play to the cameras, and her general… her-ness. I also decided to make her an Instagram model because I’ve never written a character like that before and thought it’d be fun. She also switched aesthetics a gazillion times: she went from modest Claires’ Disneybounder, to soft/pastel grunge, to pastel goth/creepy cute, to nu goth, to finally the goth/quasi-egirl thing she has now (I didn’t even know what an egirl was until Mary was actually being played. I was just looking at contemporary alt fashion trends, then later came across the term being memed and was like ‘wtf is that? *googles* … Is Mary an egirl?’).
She’s also admittedly me revisiting certain thematic stuff relating to Miranda and Bella. While I don’t want to steal gripes from Toxie, I did have similar issues with Randa in V5 that he also experienced and vented about in this thread, hence why she came back for SC2. And Bella, I’ve already stated. I kinda privately consider Miranda/Bella/Mary a thematic trilogy in some ways, actually!
My original idea for her in-game was her playing, with her actively playing to the cameras. You can see a bit of this in how she was characterized in the final product, where she goes into a ton of camera rants and her general themes. As you might have guessed, it would have played into her need for validation as well as her aforementioned showy extra traits.
Ultimately, though, I don’t really see her as a particularly bad person or a particularly good one, but more a deeply complicated and flawed person who can be unpleasant in her own way, but it does come from a place of hurt and she does have positive traits. The latter did end up coming out a bit more due to stuff happening, but yeah. What can I say? I love my trainwreck-y daughter.
Katherine Thomas- This one’s actually kind of fun! Basically, I had an idea for an ensemble cast themed around personality traits associated with the Western Zodiac, and decided to start sneaking them in to SOTF versions. Katherine is the first of these, and she’s themed around stereotypical Gemini traits as stated by the various websites I looked up (one of my biggest regrets was that I didn’t make sure that her birthday would make her an actual Gemini). Some of the stuff that Geminis are memed about never really came up with her, but it did influence her personality traits, interests, desired career path, dress sense, and likes/dislikes. Even her name plays into that fact, as Thomas literally means ‘twin.’
I was scrolling through my social media feed and saw a post about chimeraism and the causes of such. Basically, if you’re a genetic chimera some parts of your body have one set of DNA while other parts have completely separate. The article said the issue can be caused by two zygotes combining in utero, so I was like ‘okay, so Gemini person could be a chimera. Wonder how that’d effect things.’ So I researched, and then my sources told me that it’s a common reason for someone being intersex. With all the discourse about LGBT+ characters in SOTF, I thought it might be interesting to touch on something that isn’t typically explored, so I ultimately opted to make Katherine an intersex lesbian.
Then I decided to toss her into INTL and make her Australian. There’s nothing else to say here, just that I decided she was Australian. Why Australian? As I’ve stated before, I’ve actually spent part of my childhood in Australia, not too far from Brisbane in fact, so I did have a point of commonality. A lot of her is based on childhood memory and then me googling to see if my childhood memories add up, honestly.
Nora Moriarty- Okay, so, you all know the meme by now. Basically, I was stuck for ideas and was like ‘need Supers ideas’ in chat. The subject of acidic spit came up, and I joked around about creating a character who was essentially the dilophosaurus from Jurassic Park. I went off to take a shower (whee COVID schedule), and while I was in there I remembered seeing a Reddit clip of the same documentary Nora watches in her memory multishot (Here it is if you want to see it, but TW for animal predation and grossness involving komodo dragons), and specifically remembered the ending bit with the meat. I was like ‘what if my kid had komodo dragon spit’, and reported the idea back to chat.
Since I like the idea of poisoning as a killing method (hence why my reaction to the SC2 sequence was a resounding ‘YES’), a lot of Nora’s characterization was built around the idea of her using it in-game. I didn’t want her to be an obvious sadistic killer, but more of a cowardly, easily spooked person who could be pushed into killing without much difficulty for that reason. It also helps that poisoning is generally a more ‘passive’ way of ending someone’s life, in that it isn’t violent in the usual sense but it’s still pretty effed up. I also explored the implications of someone actually having toxic saliva. I reasoned that she’d probably be chronically ill and have to take a buttload of precautions in her daily life, which influenced her backstory. I kind of wanted to explore the theme of, basically, someone having a standard ‘villain’ power (poison + clear association with an animal many people find uncomfy) and how negative experiences with the power and people’s reactions to it could ultimately lead to that person doing villainous acts due to internalization. Basically, Nora has a lot of unresolved baggage that involves her Gift, which results in a terrible self-image and repressed envy towards people who have gotten to live better, less isolated lives where they don’t have to worry about their health or harming others. Which ends in her doing awful things due to her own issues.
Think I got everyone.
Felicia LaChapelle- I’ve explained this one before, actually. Felicia is me playing around with the ‘hot hypersexualized teen girl’ trope that was common in earlier versions! My premise for her was to write such a character, but make her more nuanced. For one, her actual level of experience is vastly played up by other people, so she’s experienced, but not that experienced. I also wanted to make her a sex-positive feminist to make her able to explain sexual issues on an ideological and ethical level, which, combined with the Program setting, made her more politically conscious. She’s essentially the closest Program equivalent of what a left-leaning progressive would look like. She still has her moments of iffiness as a result of being in the Programverse USA and general privilege stuff, but for the most part she’s a lefty. The name came from an April Fool’s Day prank where I pretended to replace my V5 cast with parodies of infamous rejected characters, with the ‘Felicia’ in that post being a riff on Krilacia Flameaux, an overly promiscuous French girl submitted but not approved to V5 pregame. In retrospect (and this is something I’ve confessed to before!) she ended up incorporating traits of that character but a more improved version if that makes sense?
Bella Bianchi- Bella started as a concept for Virtua before I decided she was a better fit for TV Land thematically. I don’t remember why specifically I wanted to write a character with her background, but I do remember cycling through different things. For one, it was originally opera instead of ballet/acting. I think in a lot of ways I wanted to write an effed-up home dynamic and explore the consequences of that. After I moved Bella into TV, I kind of intended her to be a bit of a bait-and-switch at first: everything about her pre-game and profile would point towards her being a damsel-in-distress type, but in-game not only would she be more proactive but a full-on antagonist.
In some ways, Bella in TV was intended to be a poke at the more horrifying TV stuff. At the time, TV1 was seen as more goofy and campy, for better or worse. However, it did come up that TV also provides a certain sense of existential horror in that these are kids dying on live television for entertainment. Bella was written in a way to play into that fact. Additionally, she was going to be a mixture of my two least favorite SOTF villain archetypes at the time which are also two of my favorite villain archetypes overall: the anti-villain and the snapcase. I have a whole TED talk about both, but basically: my beef with anti-villains is that historically it’s been misused to mean ‘this villain has kinda sympathetic traits that prevent them from being a total monster’, and handlers would say misinterpret it as ‘my character kinda feels bad about killing people and has some pitiable/likeable traits’ when they’re objectively pretty awful. My problem with snapcases is that, when a character snaps, they’re most of the time less interesting than before they did, and people historically have used a snap to do more gimmicky stuff like ‘my character is a cook, so that means they’ll cook human flesh, right?’ So, I wanted to combine the two. I set Bella up to snap, but I wanted to make her legitimately sympathetic and, well, actually an anti-villain. So, while she did have some trauma and angst, I wanted to make sure that she actually has some clear ethics, moral boundaries and noble traits that could feasibly make her more grey than other hypothetical villains (ex. She’d kill someone for one reason, but not the other, or that she’s willing to help out more heroic characters). In a lot of ways, she was intended to be a character who could see being a more ‘heroic’ type, but a bad draw meant she’s now a villain. For the snap-case part, I was aiming more in the direction of ‘psychological horror protagonist’ than ‘slasher villain’; she’s less a feared force of nature than a main character you get the see the madness unfold from their perspective and worry for their mental health the entire time.
Bella was also intended to be part of a villain duo with Rocky’s Shadi! Shadi was basically intended to be a revisit of Ashlie from Evo, so Rocky was like ‘hey, I want to do a Bonnie and Clyde-esque thing in TV, wanna join me?’ and I was like, ‘sure.’ The tldr is that Bella and Shadi were this queer-coded player duo, where Shadi is the more emotionally stable but less moral of the two and Bella is the more moral but less stable of the two. Shadi would have been basically like ‘hey, I like you and will kill you last, wanna get all corrupted and kill all these losers with me?’ and Bella was like ‘you’re evil and I’m losing it and kinda gay so.’ But Rocky got banned, Shadi was inactive-killed, and Bella’s character arc went in the direction it went.
I’ve said I would like to use Bella in a hypothetical SC3, since I feel she was underutilized in TV2. She barely had any pre-game and didn’t do as much as I’d like in-game, which sucked because I went into TV2 like ‘I had fun in TV1, but I wanna do more story things this time around’. So, Bella is one of personal picks for that. Maybe some of this stuff will come back, maybe it won’t, who knows?
Nina Riddhi- Nina was kind of a counterpoint to Bella. While Bella was intended to play into the darker aspects of TV’s setting, Nina was intended to be the sort of character who could do more goofy TV stuff while still having some dramatic beats (since I had fun with the goofy TV stuff in TV1!). Confession time: one of my least favorite character archetypes when I first joined the site was the ‘party girl type’, and while I had cooled down about it by the time TV2 came around, I still wanted to take a shot at a character type I tended to dislike. I took some inspiration from Kesha’s and Miley Cyrus’ stage persona at the time, until I hit a significant snag while writing her profile.
I paid attention to the timeline, and realized that Nina’s behavior is much more worrying than I initially thought, because it meant that she could be drinking and partying as young as 14. I thought about it, and went ‘yeah, plot point time’, which resulted in her final version of her actually trying to clean up her act by the time pre-game starts. This was actually a good thing, because I already had an idea of what her in-game arc would be. I wanted to write her as a camwhore, but I fthought it’d be fun to write one who plays into the hero role rather than the villain role. Which eventually became the whole ‘I’m going to go around and do nice things for people out of spite’ thing, which was long pre-planned before that oneshot came up.
Charlie Pemberton- Here I go playing with tropes again. As I’ve stated before, Charlie is intended to have a lot of ‘pre-made player’ traits but re-contextualized in a way that isn’t pre-made-y at all. So basically, she has a working class-esque background, her family’s business is one with negative connotations, she's a tall and muscular loner type, and also has undiagnosed mental illness. But she’s one character I emphatically told myself was never going to get a kill for any reason, nor does she have any actual violent tendencies. I also wanted her to deal with intrusive thoughts centered around violence, and I admittedly wrote her around the symptoms of ”pure o” OCD with the thoughts mainly centered around harming others on accident or on purpose. I wanted to explore the idea that having dark thoughts doesn’t mean you’ll actually do those things or have actual violent tendencies. Then Program V3 was going to have a Programlogue, I adjusted her accordingly, and slotted her into the Dogtown group.
Anneliese O’Doyle- This one is fairly straightforward. I mentioned in chat that I wanted to write a Mitsuklone, Brinkie messaged me and said ‘hey, wanna do the Megumi scene with Nani but your NPC girl dies instead?’ and I was like ‘sure.’ Anneliese is based more on the film version in psychology, but for different reasons. But yeah, she’s a Mitsuko Souma homage.
Phoebe Quincey- Again, pretty straightforward! She’s a mixture of Anna Chase from V4 and Emma Luz from V6. She got some of her darkly-inclined traits from Chase, while her being an academic type with a student government position came from Emma. Both Emma and Chase I had issues with due to their archetypes, so I thought ‘third time’s the charm.’ Her doggo was inspired by the Scott meme, while I took the suggestion of naming said doggo ‘Pippi’ after the handler. Then the bee/wasp thing happened.
Mary Cheung- Mary is… a lot of things.
First off, as I’ve stated before, she’s kinda based on my own history of mental illness and neurodivergence. It’s not an exact one-to-one; for one, Mary’s much more extroverted and social. But some parts of her stuff are autobiological in nature. While there were times I was triggered while writing her, I do find it a therapeutic type of triggering, if that makes sense? Also, I wanted to write a neurodivergent character I personally could relate to in terms of depiction. In some ways, she can be a shitty person in ways I can also be shitty.
Additionally, she’s also based off me, once again, exploring tropes. In Mary’s case, a lot of stuff surrounding her is intended to be me using edgy and/or wish fulfillment tropes on purpose as a way of stealthily critiquing them. If you oversimplify her enough, she becomes a mean girl-esque party type with modelesque looks and a focus on fashion and beauty who also has some sexualized elements and comes from a privileged background that also deals with very specific ideological stuff, and is custom-made to create backstory/pre-game drama. But, I wanted to explore the actual circumstances, consequences, and realistic-but-still-unexpected elements of those things. As an example, the one clinic flashback was me having fun touching on a rarely addressed issue with being sexually active; originally it was going to be just 'Mary goes to a regular appointment for birth control', but then I realized I could make it worse. Also, I was always going to have Jie react to her pre-game antics, it just took me a while. But, at her core, Mary’s concept was basically ‘what if instead of being this mean girl bully who is popular despite that, she’s a deeply troubled emotionally needy class clown person who is a potential bully target herself?’
I also wanted to make her a bit on the camp side, not necessarily narratively but more in personality. I also decided to give her a bit of an MPDG vibe, on top of it. This explains a lot of the not-depressed sides of her characterization: she’s supposed to be a completely extra, flamboyant, theatrical person in general. Hence why #aesthetic is a thing I mention in relation to her a lot, and why she’s the sort of person who’d play to the cameras, and her general… her-ness. I also decided to make her an Instagram model because I’ve never written a character like that before and thought it’d be fun. She also switched aesthetics a gazillion times: she went from modest Claires’ Disneybounder, to soft/pastel grunge, to pastel goth/creepy cute, to nu goth, to finally the goth/quasi-egirl thing she has now (I didn’t even know what an egirl was until Mary was actually being played. I was just looking at contemporary alt fashion trends, then later came across the term being memed and was like ‘wtf is that? *googles* … Is Mary an egirl?’).
She’s also admittedly me revisiting certain thematic stuff relating to Miranda and Bella. While I don’t want to steal gripes from Toxie, I did have similar issues with Randa in V5 that he also experienced and vented about in this thread, hence why she came back for SC2. And Bella, I’ve already stated. I kinda privately consider Miranda/Bella/Mary a thematic trilogy in some ways, actually!
My original idea for her in-game was her playing, with her actively playing to the cameras. You can see a bit of this in how she was characterized in the final product, where she goes into a ton of camera rants and her general themes. As you might have guessed, it would have played into her need for validation as well as her aforementioned showy extra traits.
Ultimately, though, I don’t really see her as a particularly bad person or a particularly good one, but more a deeply complicated and flawed person who can be unpleasant in her own way, but it does come from a place of hurt and she does have positive traits. The latter did end up coming out a bit more due to stuff happening, but yeah. What can I say? I love my trainwreck-y daughter.
Katherine Thomas- This one’s actually kind of fun! Basically, I had an idea for an ensemble cast themed around personality traits associated with the Western Zodiac, and decided to start sneaking them in to SOTF versions. Katherine is the first of these, and she’s themed around stereotypical Gemini traits as stated by the various websites I looked up (one of my biggest regrets was that I didn’t make sure that her birthday would make her an actual Gemini). Some of the stuff that Geminis are memed about never really came up with her, but it did influence her personality traits, interests, desired career path, dress sense, and likes/dislikes. Even her name plays into that fact, as Thomas literally means ‘twin.’
I was scrolling through my social media feed and saw a post about chimeraism and the causes of such. Basically, if you’re a genetic chimera some parts of your body have one set of DNA while other parts have completely separate. The article said the issue can be caused by two zygotes combining in utero, so I was like ‘okay, so Gemini person could be a chimera. Wonder how that’d effect things.’ So I researched, and then my sources told me that it’s a common reason for someone being intersex. With all the discourse about LGBT+ characters in SOTF, I thought it might be interesting to touch on something that isn’t typically explored, so I ultimately opted to make Katherine an intersex lesbian.
Then I decided to toss her into INTL and make her Australian. There’s nothing else to say here, just that I decided she was Australian. Why Australian? As I’ve stated before, I’ve actually spent part of my childhood in Australia, not too far from Brisbane in fact, so I did have a point of commonality. A lot of her is based on childhood memory and then me googling to see if my childhood memories add up, honestly.
Nora Moriarty- Okay, so, you all know the meme by now. Basically, I was stuck for ideas and was like ‘need Supers ideas’ in chat. The subject of acidic spit came up, and I joked around about creating a character who was essentially the dilophosaurus from Jurassic Park. I went off to take a shower (whee COVID schedule), and while I was in there I remembered seeing a Reddit clip of the same documentary Nora watches in her memory multishot (Here it is if you want to see it, but TW for animal predation and grossness involving komodo dragons), and specifically remembered the ending bit with the meat. I was like ‘what if my kid had komodo dragon spit’, and reported the idea back to chat.
Since I like the idea of poisoning as a killing method (hence why my reaction to the SC2 sequence was a resounding ‘YES’), a lot of Nora’s characterization was built around the idea of her using it in-game. I didn’t want her to be an obvious sadistic killer, but more of a cowardly, easily spooked person who could be pushed into killing without much difficulty for that reason. It also helps that poisoning is generally a more ‘passive’ way of ending someone’s life, in that it isn’t violent in the usual sense but it’s still pretty effed up. I also explored the implications of someone actually having toxic saliva. I reasoned that she’d probably be chronically ill and have to take a buttload of precautions in her daily life, which influenced her backstory. I kind of wanted to explore the theme of, basically, someone having a standard ‘villain’ power (poison + clear association with an animal many people find uncomfy) and how negative experiences with the power and people’s reactions to it could ultimately lead to that person doing villainous acts due to internalization. Basically, Nora has a lot of unresolved baggage that involves her Gift, which results in a terrible self-image and repressed envy towards people who have gotten to live better, less isolated lives where they don’t have to worry about their health or harming others. Which ends in her doing awful things due to her own issues.
Think I got everyone.