Commentary, Part 2

And here I am again, folks, ready for the second installment of my RP’s Commentary series.

This week’s subject: Takebachi Soramaru.

Hoo boy . . . Takebachi. XD What can I really say as an introduction? Everybody loves Take. Everybody loves reading about Take. Everybody likes collabing with Take. And what can I really say to argue? Takebachi is a fun character. Not just to write, but to interact with.

So, I guess what I’ll begin with is how the character himself was born.

As I alluded to in my previous chapter, most of my characters and the world they inhabit are subject to my personal beliefs. Personally, I’m a big fan of Asian philosophy, particularly Taoism and Buddhism. And though I know that my work will never, ever do the depths of either of them justice, I try to instill a small portion of those schools of thought in everything I write. Thus, I am a firm advocate of “balance” or, to put it a different way, “the middle path”.

That said, Take was meant to be a “foil” for Kuroshin. Or rather, he was meant to provide a point of juxtaposition for the character. He debuted within my very first chapter—the same that introduced Kuroshin. Take’s purpose within that chapter was to showcase exactly what Kuroshin’s life path was costing him. Kuroshin’s obsession with pondering the proper path of truth and justice was ostracizing him from the rest of humanity, and making him a less sociable being. Take, on the other hand, would be the complete opposite.

Now, a funny story here is that I had originally planned to kill off Takebachi within his second appearance. He would die fighting a monster with Kuroshin—just another martyr to help Kuroshin on with his cause and intensify his resolve to succeed. Fortunately, though, I shared my plans with the character beforehand with a good buddy of mine that you all know as “Cloud_X”.

Cloud didn’t like the idea of Takebachi dying, because he was fond of the character after only his first appearance. Furthermore, Cloud explained to me the value of NPC characters, and why they needed to be kept around. (More on that a little later.) Needless to say, Cloud’s opinion affected my decision and Takebachi stuck around.

Boy, was that the best decision I ever made.

As I said before, Takebachi lives for socializing. His entire character thrives off of interaction with other people. In basic instinctual behavior, some theorists have concluded that there are four principle objectives to all vertebrate animals. These four instincts exist to varying degrees within humans as well, and drive our daily actions whether or not we realize it. What are these four things you ask? Well, they’re the Four Fs:

Fight, Flight, Feed or Fuck

Takebachi, however, only represents two of these things: the first and the last. Takebachi’s response to absolutely every person he meets boils down to either fighting them or fucking them. Takebachi is heterosexual male, so often this choice is made for him based upon gender. The two middle options are rarely, if ever, a concern for him.

To be honest, though, Take’s lewd personality was born of misunderstanding. I’d written in my first chapter that Take was a fun-loving guy, and probably a bit lazy. I tried to think of what a noble would do with his free time, if he wasn’t too concerned about training or dealing with noble politics. So, I thought about what any rich, handsome and carefree individual would do: they go get laid. I wrote a single chapter about Take scoring, and all of a sudden, everyone saw Takebachi as a pervert. I thought it was actually a pretty fun angle, so I ran with it.

Another funny thing about Take is that his existence as a noble was created based upon necessity. I needed to explain how Kuroshin escaped from Soul Society and why Takebachi was able to get caught and sent back without any real punishment. His being a nobleman, with the special access and privileges that came with that status, fit within my plans nicely.

As I started to write more about Takebachi, I decided to explore his universe a little more. Now, as I said, my principle concern with my characters is “balance”; most of my characters represent a particular extreme, and my purpose is to deconstruct that extreme and show both the pros and the cons of it. Therefore, Take, being a hedonist, needed an antithesis. He needed something to show that indulging oneself on base whims wasn’t always the right thing to do, and that’s where Aoi Soramaru came in.

But I’ll save more on that for when I write about her.

I rode with this setup for a good while, and I had plenty of interesting stories waiting to tell about the growth of Kuroshin, Takebachi, and the rest of my cast. But then, something unexpected happened. Something that completely changed everything in a heartbeat.

Kuroshin died.

Yes, at my old site, Kuroshin was killed. (I’d argue unjustly, and many agree with me, but I digress.) The bottom line is, Kuroshin was dead, and most of my plot was therefore up shit’s creek.

Eventually, Cloud convinced me to return to RPing with Takebachi as my main character. This, however, left me with a few problems: as an NPC, Takebachi had a lot more freedom, and a lot of his story revolved around Kuroshin. Furthermore, I had no idea how to build the characters’ stats the way I’d want them to be. Over my time at the other site, I’d come to find the way the Hohou (speed) stat worked there to be rather useless. Therefore, I had no intention of keeping Take as the speedy martial artist that he’d original been.

My solution was to make Take a bit of a brute. He’d be large-bodied and buff—maybe not to Incredible Hulk standards, but certainly moreso than your average Joe. While playing the 2008 version of Prince of Persia, I based his build (and some of his personality) on that game’s titular character. I also gave him the use of Kidou to even out his Hakuda abilities, in lieu of speed.

But now my problem was what to write about. I decided to do a lot of collabing initially, until I got in the groove with the character again. I wrote a lot of “filler” collabs that really had no meaning for the character or his story. It was around this time that I got a certain “negative review” that completely dogged both my writing style and my characters. Once again, I’ll save the bulk of my explanations on that for later.

One positive that came about from that negative review was that it inspired me to give Take a more in-depth story so that my original purpose for the character could come to light. It was also meant as a “fuck you” to everyone who claimed that the character had no moral point or themes. The entire POINT to the character in the first place was that he didn’t CARE about those sorts of things. Take lived for self-gratification, but if he could do someone else a favor and cheer them up at the same time, great. But other than that, Take didn’t give a rat’s ass about morals or values.

With that, I developed the character further, culminating in a storyarc in which Take is forced to deal with issues with his family. Throughout my entire history at the RP, I had explained that Take HATED dealing with noble politics. But the entire point to his story was that there were consequences to sticking your head in the sand and choosing to ignore unpleasant things. Whether he was ready for it or not, Takebachi’s life choices eventually came back to bite him in the ass.

I still have plenty more ideas to write with Takebachi, and he’s still as fun as ever. I’ll keep them to myself for now, though, because this entry is already rather long, and I want my audience to be somewhat surprised.

That’s it for this entry. For my next one, I’m going to focus upon Caprizel.

We're Back!

Hey everybody. I’m having kind a slow, dragging day and turns aren’t coming to me as readily as I would like—so, I decided I would use this time to do something constructive, like restart the Bleach Channel RP blog.

What I’m gonna do for now is start something fresh. I’m gonna indulge my ego a bit and talk about a few of my personal characters. Maybe about five or six, or I might do more or less, depending on the reader reaction to this sort of thing. What I’m really gonna talk about is the creation and development process for my characters, so that I might be able to help people get some idea of what they should do. A lot of people ask me how I come up with my ideas or always find material to write from. This seems to be a bit difficult to explain sometimes, so I thought I’d just do a little “Director Commentary” and see how it works out.

So, with all that said, I think the first character I’ll talk about is Kuroshin since he’s the character I started RPing with, and I’ve invested more into him than any other character.

Kuroshin

Kuroshin, simple enough, is fanfic fodder. I got the idea for him from the IchigoxNeliel relationship on the show. The idea of a shinigami and an Arrancar having a bit of a forbidden romance was interesting to me, so I wanted to explore it with my own character. However, as most of you know, I started writing on a different site than Bleach Channel, and their rules for character creation were a lot stricter. I wanted Kuroshin to be somewhat of a rebellious character (after all, wouldn’t a shinigami have to be if he wanted to love a Hollow?), and I also wanted him to be a part of the Gotei 13.

But then, I also had the bright idea of giving him an Inner Hollow, thus making him a Vizard. The reason I did this was because: A) I’d wanted to RP a Hollow since I first heard about Bleach RPs, and B) the last RP I’d participated in, I’d done a werewolf character with a very fun motif about self-restraint. But, I’ll touch on that some other time.

So anyway, I was forced to submit my Vizard character for the original site’s Vizard faction, and I dove right into my story. So now that I’ve explained how Kuroshin was created, I guess I’ll talk a little bit about the character himself. This might be a bit of a long story, but just bear with me; I’ll try to abbreviate it as much as possible.

Kuroshin’s personality was meant to reflect myself and my beliefs. While Kuroshin’s personality isn’t completely like my own, I tried to give him the same sort of thought process that I have. In a nutshell, like myself, Kuroshin hates being wrong or perpetuating any type of injustice. So Kuroshin’s character represents an eternal quest: the struggle of figuring out what is “truth” and what is “justice”.

Bonus points on fellow Superman fans if you catch my homage there.

Kuroshin Jusutisu’s very name means “True Black Justice”. This was meant to have a double meaning: it provides clues to both Kuroshin’s theme, and as well as the author’s identity. As many of you know by now, I’m an African-American, so that was kind of an in-joke for anyone who could catch it. Which few people did. The other meaning for “Black”, though was the harsh reality of “truth”. It ain’t always nice, and it ain’t always pretty—but it is what it is.

So I started writing with Kuroshin and I immediately ran into a few obstacles. One of the main ones was that Kuroshin was boring. He was boring for most people to read, and he was boring for me to write. Like myself, Kuroshin is introverted, so what he does most of the time is think. Unfortunately, this does not translate well into an RP.

The second obstacle I ran into was that Kuroshin’s very philosophy undermined him as an RPable character. What I mean by this is, when a character is RPed, it’s simply meant for two people or more people to put their created avatars onto a stage and watching hijinx ensue. The entire point to these characters, and the RP as a whole, is for these people to mash two different stories together in an attempt to flesh out their separate universes through cooperation.

Unfortunately, a character like Kuroshin, who insists on always doing the smart, honorable, and “correct” thing, is hampered by this. Why? Because this isn’t their world.

When a single author creates a story, he or she is God of that world. What that means is, whatever observations or problems he or she has with the real world are either highlighted or eliminated completely from their fabricated one. The good guys save the day. Justice prevails, or perhaps just the opposite occurs. It really depends on how the author wants his world’s “rules” and morals to function.

However, with an RP, this world will never be yours. Not completely. So what this means is, values and morals that make sense to you might not make sense to someone else. Therefore, Kuroshin’s idea of doing the “smart” or “correct” thing might be completely different from what someone else had in mind. This was a big problem when collabing, and it was even more of a problem given that site’s insistence on spontaneous plotting, character death, and “common sense”.

These three things, in my opinion, make a fun and open RP completely impossible in the long run. Instead, it creates a system in which one person’s laws and moral codes (probably the GM’s) dominate the entire tone of the RP.

Alas, I’m getting off-track, and I apologize. What this meant for Kuroshin was that I had to alter his character somewhat and make him a far more proactive and reactionary character to RP with. I needed to make him think less and act more, which would become an eventual theme for all of my characters.

Well, that’s about it for the first installment in this series. I hope you found it entertaining and interesting. Stay tuned, and next time I’ll talk about Takebachi Soramaru.