What Draws You To Your Character?

[eightfoldfiend]

Hey, it's a not-meme.

One thing I always find fascinating in this hobby is what draws people to the characters they play so this is me asking you that.

What drew you to your characters? What do you find fun about them? What aspects of them do you find easy or difficult?

For OCs, talk about how you came up with the idea for them and why you wanted to give them a spin in this hobby.

Read, converse, ask questions!

You can answer in list form, prose form, whatever form you're most comfortable with and with as much or as little detail as you want.

Comments

Kadoc Zemlupus | Fate/Grand Order | SPOILERS for the Lostbelt arc/FGO part 2

[impostorsyndrome]

I have a lot of answers to this because I love Kadoc for a lot of reasons! I love pathetic characters, and he definitely is one of those, and I love characters with complicated and flawed motivations; I love characters who are so caught up in their own shit and the situation they grew up in that they go off the rails onto a completely unacceptable way forward that they can't extract themselves from without serious intervention, especially if they have some self-awareness of this and know they need help. Kadoc specifically feels like a callback to some themes in earlier Fate/ installments that I've also really enjoyed and played with in RP or wanted to play with, but haven't found as easy to dive into because they were more extreme and difficult to bring into a game setting. He's like a somewhat more nuanced and less problematic version of some earlier concepts I liked, lol.

Maybe even above all that, though, one of my favorite narrative types is the exploration of "what comes next" after a story ends in some dramatic and final way. Kadoc's story is very much that one: the whole point of him is that he was a "protagonist" who, from his perspective, had been set up for years to become a main character and live a worthwhile existence, and then he's unceremoniously killed the second before the legend begins, and his entire "story" ends up being a pointless anticlimax. And when he's given the chance to rectify that, even though it involves aligning himself with an unforgivable cause, he can't not take it. It's both completely understandable and completely beyond the pale in terms of betrayal, and Kadoc himself is aware of this and has complicated feelings accordingly. And then after that . . . he ends up repeatedly in the position of "this is where my story should have ended, but it's not yet," and he keeps having to decide how to move forward from breaking points he was expecting to finally be It. He's a guy who died and made some fucked up decisions to go on living, and now it turns out he's just going to keep going on living, despite his expectations. Him learning how to cope with that and deciding what he wants to do every time he's cut off from the path he was on and forced to choose a new one is fascinating to me both in canon and in roleplay. I love characters having to deal with the fallout of their own stories, the things that happen after the closing scene.

I also like characters with piercings!! 👌

OKAY I'M BACK HOURS LATER TO ADD SOME MORE I MISSED

Kadoc is a blast to play—he's actually, while not entirely outside my usual type, somewhat outside it, because believe it or not I tend to play a lot of stupid and/or egotistical characters with supreme confidence, unearned or otherwise. Kadoc is the opposite of that! But it's fun sometimes to play the one who kind of needs to be dragged along because generally I love playing off that type, and also Kadoc has enough nuance to his personality that he has checks in place for most of his harder to play traits, in a sense. He's diffident and withdrawn but also cares about people's wellbeing; he's extremely passive in some senses but is very driven to achieve goals when he has them; he's prickly and pessimistic and gloomy but is self-aware of this and dislikes it as a character trait, so he can and will self-correct. It's nice to have a character who has those aspects but in a way where they can add flavor to threads and guide his actions rather than standing as roadblocks to CR and development. I can get away with most things with him because while he struggles with his issues a lot, he's not static or set in his ways. He's aware and developing and capable of making the right choice (for fun CR, lol).

I think the hardest part of playing him is dealing with Fate/ canon shit lmao, like, it's rough on me because throughout this franchise I am almost always a fan of the Masters over the Servants (though I have and play fave Servants too!) but playing a Master/Mage means having some level of understanding of how the 'verse works, to varying degrees. And Kadoc is the kind of mage who did actually grow up in mage society and is very studied, and would understand all this obscure, opaque lore shit, and I am having to constantly stop and look things up and process them through his perspective. It is a HUGE and complicated universe and even when it comes to simple questions like "what kinds of spells can Kadoc even do outside of Avalon, when he has his normal magic": I don't fuckin know! Who knows! Magic is hard in Fate! In that sense it's nice playing him nerfed because I don't have to worry about it here, but when it comes up in conversation or narration, I cry,

[silvergarden]

Omg that last point, I'm feeling for you so hard lmao. I crawled through the Fate wiki after threading with you a few times and came out more confused than i was going in HAHAHAh

[impostorsyndrome]

GOD . . . it's always like "oh okay he needs to explain this concept, I mostly understood it from FGO, let me go glance at the wiki real quick to make sure. Oh I see this actually first came up in a game 10 years ago I've never played and it explained the concept in much more excruciating detail but there are potential differences in how it works between universes according to this obscure interview cited in the footnotes and"

😭