Who Does Your Character Look Like?

[devon]

So A Game of Thrones premiered this past weekend (which is awesome, by the way), and it was really great to connect faces to the characters I've read about for years. And it got me thinking, how do other people imagine their characters? Do you have a celebrity in mind when you write, or do you have an original face floating in your mind's eye when you rp your character? Also, where does your character's personality come from?

 

For myself, Jasen Pontean is 100% me. When I picture him in my mind, I always see myself standing there. Granted, I tend to picture myself with sweet armor, slightly better hair, and a little older, but otherwise I write myself. When I hurt my hand and needed surgery, in my vision the same scar I had on my hand appeared on Jasen's. Also, this means that Jasen's personality changes every time I write depending on how I feel. If I'm happy he is silly, if I'm mad he is a jerk, and if I'm feeling uninspired he comes off flat. I have some other characters that are much more defined in regards to their personality/image, but I never did that with Jasen.

 

Anyways, it is a cold and nasty Tuesday where I live and I thought it might be fun to see where all our characters come from. Feel free to reply to this (or any of our ongoing rps!) with thoughts about your character, or anything else that is on your mind!

 

Lars

[Eqwina]

For me it has always started with a name, hair color and eyes. I usually pick thoe very quickly and at random and then see what it spraks in my mind.

 

For example...Eqwina is me. I always see myself when I write as her, but then with Kabria (my other Aes Sedai) I see another version of myself with wild hair and even more tattoo's than I really have.

 

I had never had a character relate to anyone famous until I wrote Adela. She is 100% in my mind as Alexis Bledel! I am not sure how that came about but by the time her bio was done she was Alexis in my mind.

 

I would say all of my characters personalities are extreme's of some of my own traits. They all have a little bit of me, but with one of my traits taken to the extreme.

[Visar Falmaien]

My characters tend to have bits and pieces of me too, but also in extremes. And I also like to make characters that I think are nothing like me, maybe take a bit of me and put it in there but as for what they do, I like to make them completely opposite of me and see if that works, or have them do something absolutely horrible and figure out the psychological consequences of that.

 

I often re-use names that I've used for previous characters on other sites. (common ones: Torvus, Visar, Joruil, Turan/in) For example, the first Torvus Arathelle (extra l and e there), was an Andoran, cowardly boy turned warder trainee turned asha'man (yeah now that I look back on it, fairly implausible and godmoddy, but we all start somewhere right?). My first Visar Falmaien was a fiery, passionate blademaster in his 50s from Arad Doman. I also had another character I used a couple times named Turan al'Schaim (not knowing that the al' was a specific surname for the Two Rivers at that time, I thought it sounded middle eastern and cool). In the first instance, he was a murdering rapist under the influence of compulsion and the story from his view was about the consequences of his crime and his hope for redemption once the compulsion is removed. The second Turan, he was a tower guardsman who had been framed for a crime and forced to serve the Tower the rest of his life.

 

Speaking of GoT I have a confession

There was another Turin, when I had a very short lived rp site set in Westeros during Targaryen reign. Yeah I know horrible since GrrM does not approve of writing in his world. I either didn't know or didn't understand at the time I don't remember. Anyway, it was fun being a 'Turin Lannister', but ultimately the site died because there were so few people on it, and I have not tried to rp in that world since. ASoIaF is a big inspiration for me for my own writing and world building though, so I suppose an experiment in the world wasn't too harmful overall. It inspired me to make my own worlds, and although these rarely make good rp ideas for other people, I'm finally getting around to making some of these rp ideas something I write for myself and it's great.

 

Back to this rp.

My current Torvus is the second reincarnation of the name, and takes many of the aspects of the previous Turan's but with twists. He looks kinda like a cross between Zuko in avatar and Saladin in Kingdom of Heaven (albiet younger than Saladin so far in the story, used for my sig), with the Saldaean features. And mentally he's somewhat arrogant and cold but also very canny and intelligent, kind of like Alexander the Great or Napoleon. They can be ****heads, but be interesting as well.

 

Visar, who is also the second reincarnation of that name, but so far much younger, is from Tear, and the only person I could really find that resembles him is Antonio Banderes (hence using him in 13th warrior in my sig). He's a lot like me in that he is very self conscious and emotional, but also very brave and passionate, and these are things that I value expressing. He's vulnerable emotionally for a warder from what he's been through and the changes he's made in his life, but even in today's society when there are a lot of men that aren't encouraged to express their emotions because it's "unmanly", I think that having a male character who is willing to be as expressive as he really is that has some courage that he might not even be aware of. Anyway, Antonio Banderes. What's he been in lately I wonder...been a while since I've seen him active as an actor, or maybe I'm just not watching as many movies these days.

 

Umm I sort of have a couple other characters but I haven't used them in so long it's embarrassing to write about them lol. And they don't really look like anybody in real life that I know of. Would like to eventually work on my novice Rytali though. She shares a name with a character in one of my story ideas.

[U4ea]

lol, fun stuff!

 

Let's see... we'll start with the oldest, Loraine. Loraine was born out of boredom and merged characteristics of a few different people. Moiraine was awesome and I've always loved the dangly thing on the head, so Carhien was a must. Since I'm blond, Lor is blond, though she'd more fine boned and tiny than I will ever think to be. As for who she looks like... *points to the avatar* that pretty much nails it on the head.

 

Edana, however, is my favorite character to write for. She was originally dreamed up to be an elite member of the Band on another site, so she's got the kick-ass and take names attitude from there. When I edited her bio for DM, though, I wanted to tone down the kick-ass and tone up her sense of humor. She was modeled after one of my favorite manga characters, Alexiel from Angel Sanctuary.

 

I have others, but these two are my favorites. They both give me the chance to kick butt when I need to. The question is do I want to get my hands dirty or do I want to blow stuff up from a few feet away? *grins*

[Rasheta Ardashir]

*follows her sister Green over here*

 

This is a really cool thread! Let's see if I can deconstruct my character, since I only have one, over here.

 

Well I just have Rasheta, and usually I end up talking to Visar about my characters when I create them. Mostly because he and I have been bonded for the last five years so I want him to be okay with my character. It would be off putting to be bonded to someone who you didn't like or couldn't work around there sillyness. LOL Anyway I couldn't talk to him about her this time because he wasn't here when I created her. So she's based off my current avatar. Lulu from Final Fantasy X. Although currently in my sigs Lust from FMA is being used, although if you read my posts with her she's more Lulu then Lust. I think I still had an old version of Rasheta in mind when I made her and so I don't think it was hard for Visar to be bonded to her because he technically already was in a different guise she has little editing from the original bio. LOL But yeah she looks like Lulu from FFX. :)

[Eqwina]

*munches popcorn* Great stuff and just the little break I need from Finals hell!!

[devon]

I guess I shouldn't say I'm surprised, but it is interesting to see how many people use themselves for the physical basis for their characters. I guess over the many years I've been here I've seen people use celebrities or other characters in their signatures for their characters, and just kind of assumed that they were the physical representation for them. Kind of silly and naive, but in ever claimed to be intelligent :).

 

Now, for my other characters who do not share my personality, I had to make a conscious decision to base their appearance on someone other than myself. I found that when I rp or even play video games, that if I make a character look like myself, they will take on my personality. The closer the resemblance the more of "me" can be found in them. During my first play through of Dragon Age: Origins, I made a human Mage that I based off myself and had a really hard time playing through it, since I kept feeling bad about the choices I was making. But when I did my second play through I had an elf warrior with these big facial tattoos and long white hair, and I ended up being really brutal and not really caring.

 

To follow on Visar's off topic comment about GRRM, I always wondered what he would think about what we do here. He says he is very anti fan fiction, but is very pro RPG, and I consider DM to be a mix of the two. I would be very offended if someone claimed we were just writing fanfic, since we all have our own characters and have spent a lot of time building them up and the world they inhabit, just like you would if you were playing a table top game. I have really wanted to go to a book signing to ask him, but alas, the last time he came to Michigan was several years ago, a month or two before I picked up the first book. Anyways, those are just my thoughts...

[U4ea]

to continue down your off-topic path, I think the difference between fanfic and RP'ing is the use of characters and personalities within the world that was created by someone else. Ie, if we had someone wandering around with a character named Rand with dragon tattoos and riding under a big white banner with a dragon on it. I think the fact that, while we use his physical world and his political and cultures, we don't actually use his characters is how we illustrate that difference. If I'm not mistaken, Jordan felt the same way about RP'ing as GRRM does. He found it flattering, if I'm remembering what he said at DragonCon a few years ago, that people loved his world so much, they wanted to be a part of it.

 

And I think that's part of why nearly everyone's primary characters is just a representation of themselves within the world he created. We all love it so much, we want to be more than an outsider looking in. We want to be part of what makes it work and what makes it real.

 

It's either that or this is how we do running around on a playground pretending to the be the Thundercats in the adult-land we're stuck in. ;)

 

 

See what I did there? I managed to get back on topic. I'm rather impressed with that... *laughs*