As I said earlier, Alexandria's back-story stems from an irritation, and a desire to conceptualise how I would do it instead. This is an old habit of mine, I have a tendency to create characters biased upon what I feel a show lacks, its disgustingly fan fictiony of me. Regardless I have found it to be a useful trick as it has provided a few templates that I am now finding updated incarnations of.
Alexandria herself has gone through a few re-creations, originally I had toyed with the virtues and sins to help frame my characters, and I'll go into more detail on the results of that in another post, but sufficed to say I dropped that concept when I found it unwieldy. Following this was the incarnation of her that almost directly ported across the Dragon Ball Z fan fiction character, that too was quickly abandoned, her personality was shaped to adapt to the setting, this was not the same setting.
Following this was an attempt instead to take the more absolutely sure character. A confident leader, certain of herself and cocky about her prowess, absolutely convinced that her own powers made her a walking god. Funnily enough when I went to write this, I discovered something interesting about writing that I had been previously made aware of by someone over on Campaign Creations.
The concept that a character writes herself.
I was not quiet expecting how far that actually went. Alexandria went from this cocky character to what I think is a fully fleshed out human being, whom at this time I don't want to dive too deeply into for fear of spoiling my work before its even done, has completely subverted that cocky personality in favour of something more tempered, much darker then I originally intended and perhaps more believable because of that. Certainly more entertaining and understandable than another 'perfect action heroine' I hope.
What really surprised me was hearing her tell me, not in a literal "Voice in your head" way of course, how her relationship with what I originally intended for a minor character was deeper then I planned. When I went back to read how the two of them interacted before, I discovered much to my shock that it made sense to me. To elaborate on how it feels, think back to a favoured person telling you some interesting morsel of information that you've forgotten. Now you remember that and it's a connection to both the information and the person. That's how this feels when I'm writing, like I'm remembering old conversations with a good friend.
It makes me wonder now, in creating a person in my mind, am I simply putting their personality traits, history, life style and choices into a cooking pot, seasoned with the setting and story and then sampled to see how it tastes?
Certainly explains how I find myself sometimes subconsciously doing it for my flavour of the month entertainment when I hit that point of irritation with a setting.
What he said
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