[Meme] Top 5 things to keep in mind when writing various characters

[edenfalling]

As seen around in various places:

Pick a character* I've written and I will explain the top five** ideas/concepts/etc I keep in mind while writing that character that I believe are essential to accurately depicting them.

* Try to make it someone I've written either often or recently in order for me to answer.
** May not actually be five.

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Susan Pevensie (Chronicles of Narnia), for branchandroot

Ginny Weasley (Harry Potter), for silverblade219

Haruno Sakura (Naruto), for silverblade219

Prince Rabadash (Chronicles of Narnia), for hungrytiger11

Dave Strider (Homestuck), for askerian

Aravis Tarkheena (Chronicles of Narnia), for rthstewart

Lucy Pevensie (Chronicles of Narnia), for snacky

Uzumaki Naruto (Naruto), for vehrec

Comments

[silverblade219]

Sakura or Ginny?

[edenfalling]

Hmm. I will do Ginny, I guess, and then maybe Sakura tomorrow. :-)

1. Above all, the thing to remember is that Ginny is a Weasley. She is not some delicate flower set down in the midst of barbarians. She is just as hot-tempered, boisterous, and in love with adventure and crazy jokes as her brothers. Her crush on Harry obscures that for the first four books, but you can see glimpses if you're paying attention -- the way she pesters her mother in PS/SS, the way she mocks Ron's horrible attempt to ask Fleur on a date in GoF, or hell, even the way she managed to effectively break Tom Riddle's hold on her enough to throw away his diary... and then tried to protect Harry by stealing it back while retaining the force of will to avoid getting sucked back in for several months thereafter.

2. Ginny is not actually that nice a person. She just gets narratively excused for her worst behavior in a way that, say, a Slytherin would not. In this, she mirrors the twins and also Harry himself (who gets away with using Cruciatus and then the same day calling on Voldemort to feel remorse as if he isn't being a giant hypocrite). She mostly has her heart and morals in the right place, but she's a product of the wizarding world's broken approach to justice as much as all the other characters.

3. Ginny likes Harry in particular, but she also likes boys in general and is not embarrassed by that. I suspect that as an adult, she has much more of a wandering eye than Harry does, though I doubt she'd act on it, because...

4. Ginny is incredibly stubborn and does not easily change her mind. This can be good, in the form of loyalty to her friends and her cause, or bad, in the form of unexamined prejudices. It's also probably why her crush on Harry lasted so long.

5. Ginny doesn't seem to have a lot of friends; she insinuates herself into her brothers' social circles instead. This speaks to me of a somewhat isolated childhood, and also specifically a lack of experience dealing with other girls. She has in many ways what I think could be considered a stereotypically male approach to life -- very brash, loud, and in-your-face -- while also trying to cover that a bit in the trappings of stereotypical femininity, like dresses, hiding her interest in flying (at least until she's older), dreams of romance, etc. It's as if she wanted to define herself as "the girl" to differentiate herself from her brothers (a problem Ron also struggled with, you may recall, though without that ready solution) but didn't quite know what being "the girl" meant she should do, aside from some surface traits. And so she is awkward dealing with her roommates at Hogwarts and falls back into her old pattern of trailing after her brothers instead.

Haruno Sakura

[edenfalling]

Manga only, and also may not be viable for events much after Sasuke's first post-timeskip appearance, since I keep not getting around to reading past that point and anything I know from later on is based on Asuka's reaction posts. (Yes, yes, I am a bad fan.)

1. Sakura is quick-tempered and prone to lashing out. She spends a lot of time trying to repress that trait, since girls are "supposed" to be the ones who are polite, cute, calm, giving, nurturing, solicitous of others' feelings, etcetera, but she never gets rid of it. In fact, I think the main reason we don't see Inner Sakura much (if at all?) after the timeskip is that she learned, via Tsunade's example, that it is possible to be female AND be angry AND express that anger. Her violence is more controlled and calculated and less like an explosion after too much pressure.

2. Sakura is socially awkward and has a deep fear of being excluded or left behind. I don't know if she had childhood friends before she joined the ninja academy, but it's clear she was very isolated there until Ino adopted her. Combine that experience with her civilian background -- Lee aside, Sakura is the only young Leaf-nin we see who doesn't have a ninja family, and thus had no help from relatives to teach her special jutsu or just check over her training -- and she has the perfect setup to feel like a misfit. Her intelligence probably did not help things, since that's the sort of trait kids can tease each other mercilessly about. ("Teacher's pet" is NOT a good nickname to have.) And that history of painful exclusion can lead to her suppressing her own needs and desires in order to remain part of a group. She works on her feeling of inadequacy through the series -- her early arc with Ino is a big part of that -- but she still has moments of feeling like a third wheel, even in Team 7 where she ought to have the most emotional support.

3. Sakura is both a romantic idealist and a practical realist. She believes with all her heart in love, trust, friendship, teamwork, etcetera... but she also learns that life is not a fairy-tale. Sometimes things go wrong and you can't fix them. Sometimes you have to settle for second-best. This sets her up in contrast to both Naruto (a romantic idealist down to his soul) and Sasuke (a cynic, which is to say a romantic idealist who thinks he's a practical realist). I think the series is leaning toward validating Naruto's approach to the world, but in real life I'd be very glad to have Sakura on my side making contingency plans. (In that way, she is a much better ninja than either of her teammates, incidentally.)

4. Sakura's parents are living at the start of the manga. They may be slightly overprotective, or they may be perfectly ordinary and she's just expressing typical irritation toward authority figures. They are civilians. Presumably they survive all the events of the story (or at least are rapidly brought back to life...) since she never mentions them dying. And aside from that, we know NOTHING about her family.

Now, the external reason for this is that Kishimoto doesn't care about Sakura except insofar as she serves as a foil or love interest for his two main characters (Naruto and Sasuke), but working solely from an in-story perspective, the way Sakura's family so rapidly drops out of her frame of reference is interesting. It implies that ninja are largely cut-off from the civilian society of Konoha, except in casual business transactions. The two populations don't socialize. Sakura can't tell her parents a lot of what she does with her life because it's classified, and she doesn't want to tell them most of the rest, because her worldview has diverged too much from theirs and also they wouldn't understand her choices without background she can't give them. Unlike her fellow rookies, whose ninja parents frequently pop up as supporting characters, she has effectively lost her parental support.

That ought to play into her sense of social isolation and her need to be useful and prove herself as a ninja. Because she can't go back; she's burned her bridges, even if there is still love on both sides.

5. That all sounds like I think Sakura is a tragic, angst-filled figure. She really isn't! By and large she is cheerful, friendly, upbeat, interested in exploring new places, learning new techniques, and meeting new people. She genuinely enjoys her job as a medic-nin, both because she likes helping people and because she likes being strong. She has developed a lot of self-confidence in her skills over the course of the manga and that confidence is justified! She sometimes acts as the Only Sane Man when dealing with the ridiculously overpowered characters around her, but she can be just as ridiculous in her own way. In other words, do not let the issues I talked about in points 1-4 drown out the rest of her personality.