Feeling a bit sulky today.
I try to make my characters as distinct as I can, but every time I look at them as a group, or line them up in any way, play with more than one or two of them in my head at the same time for any length of time, it feels like it’s painfully clear that I just kinda fall into somewhat different flavors of the same handful of character archetypes over and over again.
like….
wry, dry-witted, overall well-meaning bisexual woman unwittingly gets involved in a Situation that is way above her pay grade (she’s The Protagonist)? There’s three of them.
beautiful white boy with a slutty waist who is annoyingly competent in one way and completely inept in others, queer in an undefinable way (and may or may not wind up as the meat filling in a kinda lopsided ménage à trois)? Yeah man, same energy, different ends of the spectrum.
dark-haired, straight-laced, emotionally repressed and sexually inexperienced soldier with a penchant for self-sacrifice who has his bi awakening later in life, at the hands of a sexy magic professor? Something something two nickels.
and queer men made of generational pain who hold the narrative between their hands like water in a clenched fist, throw themselves at problems until their bodies finally break, and love mages burdened with the painful ambition of fixing this broken world? What are we if not twin mirrors doomed to reflect one another, a hundred years from now someone like me will love someone like you, etc etc same old garbage on different days.
….. plus there’s also Shifty Redhead Who Loves Lying (partnered with a man with questionable-at-best morals, at first under false pretenses), that’s three nickels again
and finally some Horrible, Slutty Blond Men With Shitty Beards who leave behind criminal pasts due to a world-ending sort of crisis, and are then dragged kicking and screaming into having morals by friend group far better than they are- again different ends of the same spectrum.
Like sure, the specifics and themes differ, but it can be hard not to feel like I’m only capable of exactly six semi-original thoughts.
(the seventh will be “elf in love with terminally competent woman, used as a way to work through- and personify feelings of cultural- and personal alienation”, but that’s kinda down the line still)
