In which the obvious is news to me

[lolaraincoat]

So I'm writing not one but two bad guys for hp_dungeons, a RPG/soap opera whose recent developments are best explained in cartoon form, over here and it disturbs me -- to put it mildly -- to find all that awfulness in my head and put it on the screen. I didn't know there was any part of me that was so ... so ... nasty, you know?

I mean, I've been voicing Charlie Weasley for a year now, and he's a really nice guy (and all the sweetest bits of Charlie's character come straight from observation of fishwhistle so I can't even claim that Charlie's niceness makes up for my evil characters' meanness, because it's not mine) but this is -- different. I'm seriously unnerved.

Fanfic authors, has this ever happened to any of you? And if so, what did you do about it?

Comments

*pouts*

[ithiliana.livejournal.com]

My internet connection suddenly disconnected this morning, so I lost a great response (it happens so rarely at home or the office I don't think about composing in word, sigh).

I never feel like my re-creation is as good as original was either.

Second try! I think my experience was very similar to yours only in fanfic. I started out with quite soft, romantic, happy ending stuff, with very little darkness (I'm talking FPF here not RPF that's a different story). But I got into darker stuff, and with the Ring as canon, well, it's easy to see where that goes. So I wrote Boromir and Aragorn taking the Ring, but even so the earlier ones which had happy endings put most of the really dark stuff in Ring visisions or dreams. In later work, I wrote the graphically violent stuff, and rape, into the main narrative, but always from the pov of the victim (Faramir usually).

In my RPF, I cannot see going true dark except in role playing because of a persononal ethos: I don't want to write "villains" in RPF.

However, I had a bizarre AU rps with vampires and pirates set in 18th century (historical distance so handy) that I decided to turn into an original novel (snicker), and when I did that, I had to write parts of narrative from the point of view of the human servant of the vampires (haven't yet gotten into writing vampire pov). He was a willing servant, who got not only paid for his sort of security duties, but also enjoyed participating in torture and rape. He is sexually excited by whipping and raping young males, especially. When I started writing in his pov, I really freaked out--but the more I wrote and came to know him (nobody thinks of themselves as villain!), and saw his character as more than the kink, well, my attitude became different. That novel (I know how it ends) isn't a dark/tragic/unhappy ending, but certainly it's written at a different level than anything I've done, and I have to admit that D. comes in part from me. I guess it's fair to say we're all nasty in some ways, and yet will stand by my point made in earlier rants that writing about X is not the same as doing X (nor do I believe my vampire novel will be the *single* cause of someone going out and kidnapping, torturing, and raping somebody).

But yes--seriously unnerved at the first, but I kept writing (and that meant writing meta--I often write meta about my own writing process, snicker, yes, I know totally self-indulgent), and see things differently now.

Would enjoy hearing more about your process of creating these characters--I wonder how different it is to be writing in RPG as opposed to writing from the point of view (that's an important distinction to me--whose head are we in) in a fiction where I'm in effect in control of all characters (or so I pretend), and creating all points of view myself.

Re: *pouts*

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

Alas for your first post!

*kicks lj*

Yeah, I am completely unconcerned about the effects of my prose in the world. What worries me is how much these characters come from aspects of myself that I wish didn't exist.

As to process: hmmm. Yes it makes a huge difference that this all takes place in the context of a RPG. This particular game has a lot of consultation off-camera, so most of what I know about my characters comes from explaining them to other writers -- there's a lot of "well, Binns would do X in response to Slughorn's doing Y, out of A B and C motives" where I wouldn't know his motives if I didn't have to explain them to the person who voices Slughorn.

My other black-hat character came into existence in my head in the moment when I was rejecting another writer's suggestion about her name - it wasn't until I told my fellow author "no, not that, it's too aristo, she's more of a thug" that I realized that she was a thug.

And I am very, very lucky to have these amazing writers to play with. Spider up there who voices Bellatrix? Holy cow she's scary-good. And Djinnj who is Fenrir is a fiend for research, and also just a fiend. And pretty much everyone else who writes in the game: they're intensely creative and imaginative and energetic and just, wow wow wow. So a lot of my process is just trying to keep up with the other authors, and usually failing too.

And then we have really smart, careful and opinionated readers who have their own comm, and I get the occasional idea from their speculations (sometimes I do what they think I'm going to do but would never have thought of doing until they suggested it. Hee!)

Usually the whole thing makes me intensely happy but writing the bad guys is hard this week.

I've been meaning to write about the general RPG experience as well, in more detail, but that's a start.