[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

[edenfalling]

Caveat: these are mostly based on pre-timeskip Naruto, since I never got much past his and Sakura's first post-timeskip meeting with Sasuke in the manga. (I am a bad fan, yeah, yeah, I know.)

1. I do not believe Naruto was physically abused as a child. That would have been too obvious to cover up. But he was definitely physically neglected, even for a culture that seems to assign adult status and responsibility to people most modern societies would consider children. He was also emotionally neglected, aside from Iruka and Sarutobi (and even they were fairly distant in their attention/affection), and emotionally abused in a generalized fashion. Which is to say, he wasn't living with his abuser/s in the sense of sharing a house, but the entire village either disliked him or was indifferent to him, and that atmosphere is its own kind of poison. It is completely unsurprising that he has a desperate need for attention and a driving need to prove himself, and that underneath both those obvious traits, he is perfectly willing to set aside his own happiness and self-worth in service of his "precious people," because he's been taught all his life (in the unspoken way that the most powerful lessons are taught) that he doesn't matter, and the only way he can make himself matter is by being useful to the people who actually count. I don't know if Naruto is conscious of that thought process, but I firmly believe it's there underneath a lot of his actions and goals.

2. Naruto is a perve. He's a sweetheart and a selfless hero too, and I don't think he'd take advantage in any way other than ogling women (which is problematic on its own, but this is not the place to get into discussions of the ways that kind of invasive, objectifying behavior is frequently played for laughs in both Japanese and Western media), but he's still a perve. He wasn't like that at age twelve, though he'd clearly been spying on naked women at some point to create Sexy no Jutsu, but once he discovered hormones as well as romantic aspiration... yeah. Perve. *wry*

3. He's also an insensitive jerk at times, which I chalk up to general teenage boy idiocy. :-)

4. Naruto is an excellent improviser. This probably started as a survival trait, to cope with his isolation and neglect -- people didn't show him how to do various tasks, so he had to muddle his own way through -- and continued at least partially because he's not very good at regimented learning and is naturally impatient and wants to feel like he's doing something. Improvisation and thinking around corners are very useful ninja skills, especially when combined with luck (aka, Plot Armor), but Naruto sometimes relies on them too much, rushing in and scrambling his way to victory when a bit of preparation would have saved a lot of time and effort.

5. You can argue character interpretation in various ways, but I think Naruto's optimism and friendliness are chosen traits as much as inherent ones. Iruka's affection didn't erase years of neglect and isolation, and Naruto is highly aware that the world is neither kind nor fair, but he still reaches out to everyone he meets and believes that the people he cares about will all have happy endings. I think he is trying to create the world he wishes were real by sheer force of will.