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

[djinnj.livejournal.com]

See, I don't consider the awfulness to come from any personal rot, but rather from an awareness of just how awful the world can be. If you aren't blinkered to it, then you can tap it as a resource.

After all, we're portraying villains. We know quite well that we have to be villainous when voicing them and so we'll pick the worst of what we know. Which is (sadly for the world) pretty awful.

[executrix.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid my experience is not going to be very helpful. I've had some stories that depressed me so profoundly that the only way I could exorcise them was to finish writing them--which is obviously not an option in an RPG.

*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.

[winterthunder.livejournal.com]

It's an interesting point you bring up. I've always considered my characters to be a part of myself, amplified. I have to identify with them on some level otherwise it just doesn't work- they come across shallow and one sided. I think of it as a way to channel and examine parts of myself that I wouldn't be able to otherwise.