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.