Have you ever made a character that bothered you to play?

[Greycat]

Bit of curiosity, what can I say. Have you ever made a character that just had something that *disturbed* you when you played them?

 

I've got one I haven't remade here - her story's pretty much done. She was created - at least themed, the core of her and her personality, as soon as Stalkers were announced for COV... so yeah, before beta. Scarlett Bloom. Very *broken* individual, parents were well off enough to not really pay attention to her, bit of abuse in the backstory, so they were happy when she got into art... even if the art was a little disturbing. Main quirk was singing very ... *off* nursery-rhyme-ish rhymes before attacking. (Made PVP zones interesting....)

 

But I could *not* stay in her head for long. It was kind of easy to slip into the character basics (having macros for the various rhymes she liked most, for instance,) and I still liked the *concept,* but the way the character developed - *their* mental landscape started off with a dutch angle and broken glass and went from there.

 

Fortunately she did end up with a - let's say reasonably decent ending, having someone capture her and see she needed help, basically say "You're broken, and I'm sorry about that, and I want to help you" and *get* her to... very secure help, and in much better touch with reality. A touch that doesn't involve making "flowers" at the end of a blade. (And yes, having someone make that breakthrough that "She doesn't need prison, she needs *help*" was very satisfying. Granted, it also meant they had a lot of crayon to clean off the holding cell walls... small price to pay though.)

 

Still. She went from "this is a nifty concept" when I first started developing her on paper, pre-COV-beta, to... well, as mentioned. Hard to play, hard to stay in her head for long, 'til she was finally getting help.

 

Anyone else ever have one of those?

[White Cobra]

I guess writing and playing the ex-husband antagonist I created for my main Lady Cobra/Emily Chang character takes me into uncomfortable territory sometimes.

Of course he is designed to create maximum conflict and torment for poor Emily and as such he functions quite well, and on the few occasions I “plot monkey” play him in-game it isn’t too bad as he is generally quite polite and has a genuine motivation to get his “wife” back and can appear almost reasonable in maybe 90 % of his behavioral spectrum.

But sometimes the character does kind of “take over” and do things that I feel a bit uncomfortable about. I wrote a “writing prompt” story where he drugged Emily and then pushed her down the stairs when she was asking him for help – that scene made me feel almost too bad on her behalf. The same happened in another storyline where he was trying to hire a mercenary to beat her up so she would be broken and dependent on him. Fortunately, the other player’s mercenary decided to steal his money and refuse to carry out the assault, but I felt genuinely bad for setting Emily up like this.

The worst thing about writing him is probably his complete lack of empathy or affection towards his own child. As a parent that is something quite impossible for me to relate to and it truly hurts a bit each time I am writing something reflecting that.

[DRoddo]

I can't say that it's hard to play Ichor of Tsukuyomi. At times, I enjoy his 'Doom-guy' approach to violence (especially during MSRs and his overall kit). But, it's very difficult to tackle the part of his backstory where he saw his 5 year old child die to a stray laser from a Praetorian clockwork. I don't have any children myself IRL, but I know people who've lost their children and it's a traumatic experience. When I write for him, I try to make sure I'm not making light of such a tragedy. Sometimes, the grief and pain I try to 'emulate' can be too much.

 

Thankfully, I offset this with my other char, Aegis Thrain. He's my friendly, bright, boisterous, himbo, boy scout who always laughs and makes me feel slightly better when roleplaying him. Ya need to have that balance between edgy-broody and fun-lighthearted.

[AerialAssault]

Never. All of my characters are masterpieces and I love all of them equally, no matter how strange or broken.

 

If I ever have doubts about a character, they just get deleted and forgotten about, usually before I've invested any serious time into them.

 

This is coming from someone who has a main character called Cesspit. My bar for enjoyment is very low.

[chase]

In CoH there was this really annoying catgirl I once played....

 

Seriously though, I've had more trouble back when I was the default GM in pen-n-paper.  I did my best to adapt my vision to the characters that players brought to the table, and several gaming sessions were dominated with grimdark characters, so their opponents turned even darker and some did get uncomfortable to bring to life.

 

 

[VV]

Oh yes. I saw a painting of a gender-swapped Hell Boy, called Hell Girl. The design was fairly simple, but so cool, it inspired me to make H3ll Grrl. I couldn't just make her background a copy of Hell Boy (TM), so it got all sorts of complex and messy, including Praetorian scientists, Primal wizards, the Resistance, and Cole himself. Short version is, she ends up on Primal Earth with the idea that if she can recruit enough souls for Satan's army, he will let her return "home" to Hell. None of that was true, of course, but that's what she thought. 

 

As things progressed, she became so filled with rage that eventually I had to shelve her. She had really no filter and could easily fly off into epic strings of epithets at someone for just the smallest infraction. She wanted to corrupt people, but did not actually have the spirit to follow through on it. She also "discovered" that most people around her were absolute dirtbags (they weren't) and hewed to a pretty fundamentalist view of what constituted sin. Imagine trying to "corrupt" anyone in Pocket D.  She was meant to be gratuitously evil, but even when you tell people that up-front, they often respond negatively to that kind of roleplay, and with good reason, I would say.

 

I had planned a whole redemption arc for her, a trip to Hell and a near-death confrontation with Satan to find out the truth of her background. This would start her on the road to redemption. She might never be fully "good," but she could have at least gotten to "tolerable." Unfortunately, before she made that point, she became unplayable. She sits on the shelf as I try to figure out how to get her back together.

[Crasical]

I have only done a few scenes with him, but I have a character, 'Mister Krampus'. Mafia mage, kidnapper, blackmailer, extortionist. Like the fairytale monster, he's got a basket on his back with one or more kids trapped in it; he openly admits that they're the kids of PPD and Longbow officers that he's holding for ransom, or until their parents pull the plug on operations designed at disrupting The Family, he self-describes as an 'Evil Wizard'.

 

But he's given out good advice on life, relationships, and unwanted magical transformation origin stories, he's a good drinking partner and *apparently* so polite and charming that nobody has ever really called him on being not only a criminal, but blatantly going out of his way to target children and the helpless. I always walk away somewhat disoriented after playing him, and I'm never sure if the people I've been talking to are weirdly forgiving, or if the bar has been pushed so far with other, viler and more murderous villains that Mr. K seems positively benign. I suspect it might be the latter, one person asked if he was going to use the kids for human sacrifice and when he said no they basically calmed down to 'well that's all right then'.

[Crystal Dragon]

I have had a few characters that I simply couldn't get into for long. 

Specialist Mayday for instance, affluent daughter of a politician, had any number of routes available to her, routes that I didn't growing up. Her father a controlling butthead, she confronted him in order to be able to live a normal young adult life, something again I never got to do personally (the confronting parental figure thing that is..) and she ended up with a good person in her life. I still have her on my roster, but her good life makes her difficult to get into the headspace of.

 

It's not intentional that a character ends up difficult to embrace, but sometimes that happens. I work with my characters partners to try and find a way to bridge the times they are not being played or rped in game simply do they know that I am trying even if my brain doesn't want to.

[McSpazz]

At the time, no. But there have been characters that, in hindsight, I found to have extremely distasteful qualities or were down right problematic. The two that come to mind are Cipher Yietra and Kieten Whiteflame.

 

The former was an Asura I made in Guild Wars 2 and while I loved the character and still do use aspects of him in new characters, one thing that didn't age well was that he and everyone else in the family had some kind of mental illness that others in the family didn't. I didn't realize I basically created the seven dwarfs if those seven dwarfs all desperately needed to go on medication and see a therapist, but that's exactly what I did. When it was pointed out to me, I felt pretty shitty. It would be like making a character with the "defining trait" of autism. Very cringe, will not do again.

 

The latter was my first ever roleplay character in CoX and...in hindsight, it was VERY clear that he was being played by an edgy high school freshmen. Reading off his backstory is like reading an elvish version of My Immortal with far more triggering elements thrown in because EDGY IS COOL. Again. Very very cringe. Will not repeat.

Besides that, just in terms of character's who's morals were super dark/evil...I don't have many of them. The closest I had was a pretty messed up nightmare entity, but he kind of softened up as time went on. I have a really hard time playing evil characters because I find far more enjoyment taking down tyrants than being one (no shame to anyone who differs though!)

[DrunkFlux]

Depends on the character theme, though chars I don't rp often it can also be a result of my altitus; many minor alts tend to collect dust.

 

But for unplayable characters;

 

Mystic Chaos/Amanda of the Wild (Same toon, diff iterations)

For a character thats currently hard to roleplay and I have shelved, is a character who thematically is so overwhelmed with "Magic pollution" she'd become horribly mutated.  However, the character she was most friends with was also roleplayed by someone who've I come to despise(a godmoder and also RL beliefs are to extreme and dangerous, even terrifying), this also got in the way of another character rp'd by a different friend as they hang out with the person I despise.  This has resulted in the character being effectively shelved; as much as I enjoyed the character I havent really been able to move them forwards much.   It also didn't help that same player wanted to push the development 'against' the planned character development arch for the character; she's trying to regain her humanity, he wanted her to get rid of it.  Not to mention it was I who got the player who ruined it all into this game to begin with.

 

I'd need to visit on it sometime with a mage themed toon.  But it is to me a tragedy that still scars my account a little, I do not want to get rid of the character, but I've a hard time wanting to rp her because of how badly a friendship was ruined.

 

This is also a result of redundancy; two other characters are similar in theme, although not anywhere as severe, both are also much more powerful playstyle wise, this has further compounded the situation shelving the toon even further.  Ultimately, until I really get back into RP in a major way in this game this character is just going to remain shelved.

 

I can think of a character in a comparable situation in star trek online to the above; the same friend came from STO, but I have fixed the toon by effectively "Aborting" and retconning everything said above person had ever rp'd with me, and even outright killing some sides of the character I was trying to kill off to begin with.  But it's unfortunate that I'm unsure what to do with Mystic Chaos.

[Redletter]

Hmmm... I dont know really. Like, Ive mentioned my Merc/Emp character, who is a career mercenary commander of a group of soldiers she has cloned. These are (see: were) people she once knew, real human beings she shared good memories and times with... who she now just throws away, she doesnt even see them as people. When OTHER people comment on it she's just like "yeah, cloning is expensive but it's cheaper than trying to field a private army" combine this with all the steroids and things, for men who are loyal (at least two of whom have feelings for her) and dedicated selflessly to her cause... it's like... I play it all for laughs? But like, she has this opinion about a lot of people. Nameless vanguard soldiers? Longbow peons? They aren't "people" to her, theyre cogs in the ever-churning warmachine that is the conflicts of the world. She even kinda values *actual* warmachines more than soldiers in some instances and like... my real compunctions about all this flagrant disregard for human life is that's it's shockingly accurate to real life and while I could play her for hours, people ENGAGING with her more deeply than the "haha funny merc lady is angy at her goons for dying cuz now shes gotta spend munz on cloning them lol" tends to make me less and less happy to play her (though I do have BIG GATOR who's the total opposite, he loves his goon squad).

 

Recently though, there's some of my goldside characters Ive been giving more love to. I made a bio/spine tanker for a crusader run, after having done a responsibility loyalist (who picked up some power sidequests here and there), and while loyalist has its moments of like "oh that's kinda fucked" Im finding more and more of the resistence contacts *arent* good people, especially those *IN* the resistence proper. Like, for every Jessica Flores you get two or more people like *THIS* fuckin' guy...

Like... the LAST time I heard something like this, it was palpatine telling anakin why killing kids is totally fine. Now, I don't know how human the ghouls are? Ive done the event in Neuropolis where you go into the sewers and hunt a whole bunch and the way some of them speak and the info provided by reading the "info" section on them implies most ghouls were made to replace PPD officers and that theyre functionally more like the prime earth's trolls than vailok's zombies. I digress. My point is, this guy is talking about finding the humanity in ghouls and rather than bringing that out to rehabilitate them, or to offer them a chance at happiness despite their condition... he's legit talking about GROOMING people. Like... Cole does this too, amongst much more. But the resistance is also bombing hospitals. You know. Where regular people are recovering? Where doctors are helping bring new children into the world? People who have NO idea what's really going on, people who are far more negatively effected by the resistance's actions than the terrifying authoritarian regime theyre living under. There's another contact, I dont have the screenshots anymore, but he's a politician? And he's found out that some crusaders in the resistance have joined forces with the destroyers. And his task for you isnt "find out what theyre doing and stop them" it's "find out where theyre keeping all the evidence we're involved with the destroyers and destroy it so we dont look bad".

What Im getting at is that playing a character who's totally complicit in all this and actively pushing for not only this, but even MORE extremes is VERY hard for me. Like, my character here is unambigously named for their bone powers which I play as extremely painful to them to use. Being conscripted into powers division, the constant pain has driven them somewhat over the edge. Playing her is very hard. One part due to the discomfort I feel when im basically typing her screaming everytime she redraws her bone spines, or everytime she uses thorn burst (I usually dont bother if im going solo) and of course, just undertaking these missions and seeing my character's responses to some of these things and it's like "wow Im kinda actually a psycho."