Characters

Star Wars is coming out soon. Very soon. Not soon enough… and since I am a bit of a fan I have been immersing myself in all things Star Wars (except for the Phantom Menace *shudder*) to keep me occupied until the new film is released.

I’ve been playing the games, kicking all kinds of butt with my character in Jedi Academy and I’ve been reading the comics or graphic novels as they are known as now. I even spent an entire weekend downloading and installing the MMO that they released and I stopped playing a month after it came out. Through all of this and most especially with the comics, I’ve been thinking about the characters they use.

Ask any fan of the movies, who is the worst character and you will likely get Jar Jar Binks as the answer. I have to agree, but he was an extreme version of the character you’ll find in all of the Star Wars media. The faintly idiotic comic relief character that I tend to hate.

I understand their purpose and can still enjoy a story despite their presence but it is overdone in the SW universe. The characters are all the same. You have the hero, the lovable rogue, the idiot comic relief, the little known filler character who will die soon and of course, the bad guy.

It’s obviously a formula that has worked for George Lucas and I am a fan, but sometimes when reading or watching I just want to get to know the bad guy a little more.

This is the same for anything. I enjoyed Dexter and even Hannibal though I disliked the style of the show itself. Wicked City ( A new show) is great because the focus seems to be on the bad guy. I like to know these characters because they are generally the most interesting.

In my first series, the zombie apocalypse one, my main character is a killer. He isn’t especially charismatic or friendly and he struggles to grasp the basic things that most people take for granted, such as empathy and compassion. He kills without remorse and I love him for it.

I love it because I have read so many stories where the everyman lead struggles with the morality of taking a life. Where the heroine is caught between her desire for handsome man number one and handsome man number two. Where the bad guy creates an elaborate trap that will allow the hero to get the one device/artifact that can stop him rather than just gutting the hero when he has the chance. I love it because it’s different.

Now don’t get me wrong here, there’s a reason why the love triangle, bond villain and farm boy hero get re-used. It’s because they work and I’m not saying everyone should focus on the villains point of view.

It would be nice though if your love triangle was a little different, your farm boy didn’t go through exactly the same plot each time and the villain wasn’t quite as incompetent when it comes to dealing with the hero.

Have the elaborate trap but have a solid reason for it beyond ‘it’s more exciting.’ Have a love triangle but change it up a bit. Make your hero jump through just a few different hoops. If nothing else, look at your characters and think to yourself about whether they are the same as all the rest or if they are different.