All About My Fabulous Self

Character Design Help... (please halp me I don't have a life)

I've been trying to get a sense of my character in an original story of mine that I've been writing for the past year or so. I've been trying to get my friends offline to help me, but they didn't help me any. SO! I'm turning to you guys, for legit help on keeping my depressing backstory in check. Sometimes I tend to overdo it, and make my main characters carry a huge weight on their shoulders *cough cough Mei cough cough* that is way out of porportion for their personality, and just overwhelming for the reader and even the writer.

I have been typing up the following [crap] document for about a week now, trying to plan out just the kind of person I want Akane to be. IN NO WAY IS THIS THING PROFESSIONAL AT ALL! I literally just typed it exactly as I thought of it. Well, without further ado, here's my current character design for Akane Nuria:

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I know that I want Akane to be practically alone, with her mother leaving really early in the morning and returning really late at night. But, the thing I'm not that sure about is her background, and what happened to make her change from a bright sun-shiny girl to the rebellious sarcastic and blunt teenager she is in the present of the book. I know that it has something to do with her father, who isn't a part of her life anymore due to reasons that have yet to be planned out, but I wanted Akane to be a daddy's girl, and be really attached to her dad when she was little and still the happy and smiling girl she used to be. Then, something bad happened, Akane was traumatized and on top of that her father left soon after, of course with a large debt. Having paid off that debt after many many years, Akane and her mother are living in an apartment of somewhat decent condition (it constantly needs to be repaired), both working two jobs to keep their heads above water. Akane will make dinner for both her and her mother (usually something cheap like instant ramen, a simple sandwich, or something one of her co-workers brought to work for a holiday or something), and leave it wrapped on the table for her mother to heat and eat.

Akane is attending the cheaper public school in her neighborhood, so that she could raise money to eventually go to college and get a really good paying job to help support her and her mother. However, because of the trauma caused before her father left, she gained sarcastic tendencies and talked back constantly to her teachers, despite always resulting grade-wise at the top of her class. Her mother has warned her about being sent home because of behavioral issues, but her threats fell to deaf ears as the two never got to see each other at all unless Akane stayed up doing a project or something.

Akane met Mrs. Kazehaya in her first year of highschool, when she was her home teacher and she was still Ms. Kuronoma before she got married. Mrs. Kazehaya was the first person to, instead of scolding her for her bad behavior and sending her home for the day like other teachers would, took her by the hand after school and asked her what was wrong. She even went as far as walking home with her and staying with her for a while because Akane merely said she got lonely sometimes when her mom was gone for work. The two have had a close relationship ever since, and even though she isn't Akane's teacher anymore (due to her current homeroom teacher wanting her to pay, so whenever Mrs. Kazehaya requests her, it gets denied), Akane still comes to her classroom whenever she has time, mostly during gym class, free period, and lunch period.

A normal day for Akane would go as such: wake up at 7:10, get dressed and prepared for school, leave and eat a small breakfast on the way, listen to the newest gossip from the girls in her grade, wait in the classroom for class to start, do something in class to anger the teacher which results in being told to stay after class, sprinting out of her first class and hanging out in Mrs. Kazehaya's room for gym, heading for the empty room at the end of the hall to practice fighting, and then go to her two classes after that, then go up on the roof and stare at the sky for lunch break, continue to classes, and leave school at the end of the day. After school is over and done with, Akane heads to her first part-time job at a bakery owned by a sort-of childhood family friend named Luke, which is mostly delivering ingredients to the bakery and then delivering baked goods to customers from 4pm to 9pm. If there are no more customers to serve or ingredients to transport, then Luke allows her to go home After that is her night part-time job, working in a bookstore in the yaoi manga section (the specific area she works in isn't revealed until after she has to quit both jobs to go to the Autumn village, and Mikki and Kara discover her yaoi collection), from 10pm to 3am. Then she goes home, makes a quick dinner, then sleeps from 4 to 7:10, and starts the cycle over again. Towards the end of the week, she will sleep in her English and History classes during silent work time after her projects are done with to catch up on the sleep she is deprived of by her work schedule, then sleep in on the weekends when she gets off of the bakery part-time job.

Her ties to the Autumn village are still unknown for now, but I also want her to be closely related to the enemy (her baseball coach from when she was little is a strong option that I'm pondering, and also the evil leader being her aunt on her dad's side or something), but those details haven't been planned out since I haven't gotten very far in writing the story itself.

I know for a fact that a message I want to get across to by readers is female empowerment, that a woman can do anything a man can do and are as smart as a man, female empowerment in general. The two main characters that are going to portray that message is Akane and the Autumn Headmaster, since they are both being attacked because they hold a somewhat high ranking while being of the minority gender (The Seasonal Villages just recently gave women their rights, and almost everyone is protesting against it except, of course, women in the training program). But, I don't want to give the message that women are better than men, and I certainly don't want male readers to get angry if the heroes are all female. That's why, I had the other Headmasters be very strong men who could handle a battle by themselves, but need Headmaster Calgon to fully succeed. I want men and women to be viewed as equals, and show that it's better for women to have the same rights men have.

I just started thinking, what if Akane was actually from the village, then got taken away by her "parents", and her real mother is the evil lady? Then the evil leader would have a grudge against Akane and her father for leaving, and seeing Akane being as strong as she is, she wants her to join the dark side (haha, Star Wars references. I need a life. Oh dear Galaxy Cat, this is going to be a beast to edit XD). Anyways, I wanted this to be an important part of the story telling, because I wanted Akane to have a huge internal conflict with the justice of her people and the friends she cares about, and the love she holds in her heart for this family member or really close person.

The death of Odee finalizes her decision though, because he ends up sacrificing himself to keep her away from them and now she wants to win this war to avenge everyone's deaths. To make sure Odee didn't die for nothing. To make sure that everyone who lost their lives, didn't die in vain. That their deaths meant something for the new era of peace that surrounds the Seasonal Villages and the island after the war finally ends. If it ever ends.

Akane herself is the first interesting character I have created, and so far I've found it difficult to really get inside her head and figure out what her stance would be on certain situations like death, abandonment, nightmares, and I don't know how she reacts to all of her emotions, and the different subcategories of those basic emotions, plus the things that trigger them. I need to get more into depth about Akane, because with her as my daughter (I call my characters my children, don't judge me), and me laying out and trying to show her raw emotions as they would be in real life, it's important for me to understand her logic, emotions, and her version of common sense to really accentuate her potential as an amazing, strong character, and highlight her positive traits and her flaws, to show that she is human like the rest of us, and not perfect. There is one thing, I know very well about Akane, and this is what makes her somewhat naive: Akane thinks she can save everyone, that under her protection that everyone will be fine and victory will come without a huge sacrifice, that's what she's learned from the life she's lived until she moves back to the village, because she didn't have to give very much up to be successful in the things that the somewhat normal society believed were important. But, the Seasonal Villages are a whole other story, people give up their lives just for the chance to give the people of the next generation more freedom and rights than they themselves have now. It takes a long while for Akane to understand and fully accept this fact, but here she doesn't have as much free time or choice as she did back home, everything she does now she has to take into account how it would affect the people around her, because while back home she didn't really care about the people around her (literally, in the halls she just ran through the crowds and didn't even care about the people she hit), here she can't do that, and every little thing she does could lead to the village's destruction or a hotter war with the enemy.

There. That's what I have.

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Until next time, my filthy human toilets~!

~Mina-chan