While it may sound like I’m stating the obvious here, your character needs to have something they want to accomplish. Maybe they want to be the best at something, see a place, fall in love, conquer the world, or something else. Whatever it is, they need to have something that they desire beyond all other things. Ideally, give them more than one goal. Make them have to sacrifice one to achieve the other, to add extra drama
Maybe they’re the best artist in their class or they’re great at juggling. Perhaps they slipped on the stairs in front of their whole village. Either way, give something for the locals to remember about them. That way it can give you a starting point for the interactions with other characters
Whether a friend, a coworker, a sibling, an army buddy, or someone they saved, have someone close to your character whom they’re close to and wish well. Yeah, angsty “I have no friends” characters can be fun, but in small doses; eventually the reader gets fed up with them. At the very least the character needs someone to talk to or bounce ideas off of
It may be a neighborhood they grew up in, their parents’ house, or a room they’ve been renting in a tavern. Hell, it could even be a person if you so choose. Everyone needs to feel secure at one time or another
Now, recognize that this may not work for EVERY character, but it’s up to you to decide what will fit and what won’t. In many cases, it can work. A signature item is something that is recognizably YOUR CHARACTER’S, be it a weapon, a scarf, a toy, or a piece of jewelry. It’s something that makes them feel like themself
This should be something other than the problem addressed in the main plot line. Maybe a member of their family is sick, they are broke, or they’re failing their classes. This helps make your character seem more realistic because NO ONE has one problem at a time
This can affect the plot or not; either way, it helps make your character more well rounded. Maybe your character can’t read, left their crewmates to die when a kracken attacked their ship, or made their long lost sister run away. If you choose to have it affect the plot in any way, this secret should embarrass your character, make it so that other characters don’t trust your character, or somehow endanger them and the people they’re close to if found out
Maybe it’s because your character wants to be like their hero, maybe it’s so they can repay a debt (like if someone saved their life previously), maybe it’s for their child, but your character needs to have a reason to occasionally face their fears
Have fun!!!
I understand that this is meant to be simple, but GOSH DANG, is it so helpful! This came at the perfect time for me, as I am in the process of creating characters both in the realm of fictional writing and tabletop roleplaying. I’ve been seriously struggling with one of my characters for a long time now and always felt something was missing. Only now do I realize - I had all of these, except for a secret! Well, I gave him a secret to keep, but not one that would make him fearful, embarrassed, or ashamed! And what point is there in a secret without a price attached to it’s exposure? There was no cost, no blow to his own worth or self-esteem or ego, to keeping that secret from his friends and allies. Now I know I need to sit down with my DM and work out where to interweave a potential secret into the plot.
Thank you for this, OP! May it genuinely help all of my followers as it has helped me.
This is absolutely incredible. $2 a month and you have access to all the Shonen Jump manga you love including BNHA, One Piece, The Promised Neverland, and many more including a back catalogue.
This is so important. Please subscribe it’s only $2 a month guys.
i like how the rock asks the women he cares about if they’re happy. ive seen a story like this about his mom where he asked if she was happy. it’s just a nice thing to ask a woman, i think.
You will literally never have a better reason to cry
I’m AT WORK and now I’m CRYING why the Fuck did you DO THIS TO ME
While this funny, please read the article, because you need to know what these people have been caught planning.
ZPS set up a website with pictures of the 1,500 rioters they’d identified, but visitors to the site could only see 20 pictures at a time. So frantic fascists went to the site’s search bar to see if they’d been named.
“The first thing they’re doing is using the search function on the website to input their own name, or somebody they know, but who nobody else knows, in order to see if this website really works,” Ruch said, “to see if it’s really possible that we identified 1,500 people.”
The site received a traffic boost after a far-right website linked to it, Ruch said. ZPS built a map of names that appeared in the same users’ searches. From those searches, alone, they learned the names and associates of approximately 25 rioters they hadn’t previously identified.
“What we got was quite a network of who knows who, and who else was in Chemnitz,” Ruch said.
U.S. anti-fascists have pulled similar stunts. This summer, undercover activists cozied up to the organizers of a far-right march, and offered to make a website and coordinate T-shirt orders for the event. The website, which did not charge for T-shirts, asked participants for their names and addresses, supposedly to calculate shipping costs. Instead of sending free T-shirts, the activists behind the website published the names and addresses they received.
ZPS’s performances have previously landed it on far-right extremists’ hit lists. In April, German police arrested a soldier who was suspected of planning far-right terror attacks, which he allegedly wanted to blame on refugees. The man also reportedly kept a list of leftist figures he wanted to murder, among them ZPS affiliates.
A September investigation into the alleged would-be-terrorist revealed a larger ring of suspected extremism among Germany’s military elite. Germany’s FOCUS magazine reported that the criminal investigation had uncovered a network of far-right soldiers and officers planning for apocalyptic violence on “Day X,” when they would take over the country.
“It’s terrifying, but I don’t want to live in a country where I can’t do radical political art,” Ruch said. “We need to know who this is, who finances it, who the driving forces are.”
good on ZPS for sure but uhhhhhh holy fucking shit that bolded paragraph made my stomach flip upside down