Amateur's Guide To Making Original Characters, I guess

What is a "character"?

If you just read the Author's Note and you came here right afterward, congrats I got your attention somehow. 😅

So, what is a character?

Why are you asking me? Everyone should know at this point what a dang character should be. Unless you're 5 years old, in which case how did you even get on Wattpad???

I know, I know, every guidebook ever tells you what you likely already know, especially if it's something as broad and simple as a character. However, given the broadness of what a character could be, it is important to at least be reminded of what they are.

In school, they tell you that the characters of the individuals being talked about in a story. Books often say similar things, with the added thought that the characters can be people and animals just as long as they're the focus of the story. Basically, characters are the animated goofballs or anime protagonists or the vintage comic book hero or the playable AIs, or even the ever-famous raven tapping at the door.

To put it in perspective, a character can really be anything so long as the story features them. It doesn't even have to be a major role- a character can just be in the background like a Fnaf Easter Egg or something. They don't even have to speak or be mentioned by anybody or anything. As long as they're to some capacity alive and can think, they're basically a character.

That being said, the only real things that are written or filmed that don't necessarily have characters in them are things like essays or documentaries. Basically, anything that goes along the lines of "giving you factual information about a real-life thing" doesn't have a character per se since there's not technically a story, or at least not the kind of story most of us are used to. They may look at a creature, describe what it's doing and its probable thought process, but they don't usually stick to the said creature for very long. And essays sometimes start or use a fictional example of someone researching the topic or getting themselves into the problem the essay is discussing. These aren't necessarily characters since the overall point of the essay or documentary doesn't truly have a story. They're just examples of what the informational essay or documentation is talking about so the audience has something to look at for understanding.

A character can really be anything. A person- real or not-, an animal, living objects, mythical creatures, aliens, urban legends, a skeleton with an obsession for ketchup- really anything. Even rocks that aren't necessarily alive can be characters as long as the work gives them a personality and emotions. Ghosts and emotions with bodies and speech patterns count as characters too so long as they look and feel "alive".

And if it makes you feel better, basically any character- no matter who made them- is original. Yes, OCs usually refers to characters that aren't in a show or book and are often used as a way to separate fan-made characters from the canon characters. But technically every character that has been owned by a company or under a license was, at one point, an OC of some kind just like fan-made characters or characters made by "regular people". The creator of Steven Universe created her characters while she was still in school long before she got a chance to make a show with them, and God only knows how long a certain Pokemon design had been laying around before Game Freak looked back at it and decided to use it for their games. Heck, some movies were made just for the sake of a school project and they ended up being considered quite good. And sometimes fan-made characters for fandoms can make for some of the most interesting original characters.

So- and this is the million-dollar question- how do you go about making a good original character?

Well, I often find myself making characters fairly easily. I take aspects of the parts of them I make them from- like their appearances, personality, and what inspired them to begin with- and then I kinda just fill in the blanks. Sure, sometimes I can't think of much for a character for one reason or another, but sometimes a simple character is a way to go.

Take Garfield, the fat orange cat in the newspaper comics. He's a fairly simple creature. He's lazy, hungry, grumpy, sometimes mischievous, and sometimes frank and truthful about a topic. Most backstory he has in the original comics themselves is that he was born in an Italian restaurant- hence his love for lasagna- before getting adopted by Jon. At least that's the version I heard. Idk. He's changed somewhat over the years and throughout different media forms like cartoons and movies, but overall you still know him as the lazy fat cat he was when he was made. That's certainly a lot simpler than your typical anime protagonist these days.

Then you have complex characters like, say, DC's Raven from the Teen Titans or Square Enix's Joshua from The World Ends With You. Sure, simplified you could say that Raven is a gothic magic-user and Joshua is an oddly lovable douchebag. But when you get down to the nitty-gritty, they are SO much more than that. Raven appears gothic and emotionless because her powers are controlled by her emotions; the more she feels, the more powerful her powers get. However, there's a catch. Too much power to her magic via emotion and her demonic half takes over and could cause havoc. Furthermore, if her demon half goes too far, she risks the arrival of her demon father Trigon appearing and taking over the Earth as part of his cruel reign. To prevent that, Raven has to hide her emotions daily until she can find inner peace with herself (or eventually succumbs to her father's wishes and becomes his pawn, depends where you look for Teen Titans canon). In the infamous Teen Titans Animated Series, Raven partially coped with this lack of emotion with a large dose of sarcasm and satire, resulting in her stating some *very* funny lines such as the famous "evil beware, we have waffles" line. But it wasn't until later in the series did you realize why exactly Raven held back so much; because she didn't want the world to end.

And Joshua- oh Joshua- isn't just some smart boy with an attitude; he's the God d**m Composer of Shibuya. I.e, he basically controls over who gets a second chance at life after they compete in the Reaper's Game. The secret plot of TWEWY is that Joshua, seeing how toxic society has become over the years, is willing to destroy the UG version of Shibuya to prevent it from infecting the other locales of Japan. And we learn through speaking with him during the second week of TWEWY's story that Joshua feels that it's necessary to keep people out since people don't understand other people so easily. However, when you finish the game and you're faced with the realization that Joshua basically used Neku- the character you play as- just to determine the fate of Shibuya, he allows Neku a shot at becoming Composer and saving Shibuya by giving Neku a gun. And Neku... doesn't shoot him. He loses to Joshua. And yet... Shibuya is ultimately spared in the end. Why did Joshua go to all this trouble just to basically say "it's not worth the time"? Well for one, he's a douchebag. And two, it's because of why Neku didn't shoot Joshua in the first place. Neku was his friend. His first-ever friend, as it basically turns out to be. Joshua was just lonely... and Neku made all the difference.

Phew, my hands and arms hurt from typing that, and there's still so much about those two characters I couldn't go over in one sitting. But it's worth it. Still, you can see why simpler characters like Garfield are the better choice for some people. No backstory. No intricate and difficult emotions to deal with. Just clean-cut lazy goofiness. But sometimes people love the complex characters more because they're more relatable and more human.

You get the idea, right? I hope so.

Next up we'll go into further details regarding simple character vs the complex character. Cheers! 🐉