I Am A Prick...
Jun. 17th, 2007 01:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
magicaddict...and so are my characters.
With full knowledge, intention and ability to stop myself, my characters keep coming out with the nasties. Putting people down, taking the piss and either finding ways to get out of it or shrugging and letting someone else handle the problem.
It doesn't matter who the character is, it seems to be a mirror for everything about myself I truly hate, whether it's boring, insulting, offensive, or just unwilling to consider other people's feelings. This makes them pricks. The fact that despite the fact I don't want them to do it, never designed the characters to do it, and given the choice wouldn't do it, I do it, and offend people, makes me a prick too. I don't care that's it's in character, and that others may not be offended by it on an OOC basis. I bloody well am, and every time I realise what I have done it changes my opinions of myself and what I portray.
I don't want this. I don't want any of it. I want to be so far away from what I do every time I show up and time in, and yet I am told it's great.
What. The. Fuck.
With full knowledge, intention and ability to stop myself, my characters keep coming out with the nasties. Putting people down, taking the piss and either finding ways to get out of it or shrugging and letting someone else handle the problem.
It doesn't matter who the character is, it seems to be a mirror for everything about myself I truly hate, whether it's boring, insulting, offensive, or just unwilling to consider other people's feelings. This makes them pricks. The fact that despite the fact I don't want them to do it, never designed the characters to do it, and given the choice wouldn't do it, I do it, and offend people, makes me a prick too. I don't care that's it's in character, and that others may not be offended by it on an OOC basis. I bloody well am, and every time I realise what I have done it changes my opinions of myself and what I portray.
I don't want this. I don't want any of it. I want to be so far away from what I do every time I show up and time in, and yet I am told it's great.
What. The. Fuck.
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no subject
Date: 2007-06-18 07:33 pm (UTC)Your characters are not you. Really, they're not. They are made of things in you, but then I'm a firm advocate that all the really horrible stuff of humanity is easy for all of us, if you look in the right bit of each of us. If it's really worrying you, sit down at the end of the day and think about when you might have acted like a prick, and when you could have but didn't. Put them in proportion of scale and context, then decide if you acted unreasonably. If you don't like the way you're acting, take a decision to change it.
As near as I can put it, you define who your characters are, then they find their limits. Your characters define your limits, but you make who you are.
no subject
Date: 2007-06-22 11:24 pm (UTC)Every time I change something about the character, it's further from the original design, and therefore ever-more indicting of how bad the original idea was in order to require so much refinement. This isn't IC gaining of experience and letting it shape you - it's fundamental errors at character creation that make what you portray simply wrong.
My characters do not define their limits. I do. Unlike some people who are able to shift into a different mindset entirely and be someone else, the vast majority of my roleplay isn't spontaneous. The script writes itself half a second before I speak it. The characters do not talk to me, bounce at me, live in a portion of my head or make their own ideas. I do.
Ergo, some of the fault has to be mine when I believe my character has insulted someone - whether I actually have or not.