How to make people (other then yourself) like your character

[axleonex]

COMMANDMENT I: A Perfect Character is a Boring Character. Your character is strong, charismatic, gentle, loving, always wants to be the hero, and is the type of guy that everyone wants to be. STOP. RIGHT. THERE. If this character is everything we want to be, what's left for us to know? Why would we want to follow his story? He's already perfect. Think of every character you know, point out their flaws. They're not perfect, why is that? Because a good character has a good struggle. We want underdogs, underdogs that are expected to fail so that we can root for them. We want someone that has to work hard and fail bad when shit goes down. They can't win every time, that's repetitive and boring. Bad guys come, good guy fights, good guy wins. Too genetic, too obvious, and there's no point in hearing The story.

Now try this: Bad guys show up. Good guy comes and gets his ass kicked. Bad guys cripple him, kill his dog, and get away.

Losers. We want to see losers struggling to fight. Knights in shining armor are unrealistic, because shining armor only implies they've never been in battle.

"But what if I want my character to be a strong hero?"

Even Gods have their flaws. (Serious flaws too, have you looked into Greek mythology?) I can't create a struggle for each type of character you'd like.(That would take too long) Just remember that with great power, comes greater collateral/psychological damage. Even heroes have weaknesses. Make them hate themselves, make them overly attached to someone, make something stand out. Which brings me to my next commandant.

COMMANDMENT II: For the love of God, give them a personality. She's shy, but adventurous. She's a jerk, but has a heart of gold. She doesn't fit in, but loves making new friends. She's a bitch, but wants love. See the pattern? Because I don't.

YOUR CHARACTER IS NOT AND SHOULD NOT BE EVERYTHING.

"But I want people to like my character, so I want her to have a little of everything"

OCs are like real life people. (Shits about to get deep). Each character has distinctive personalities that separate them from everyone else. One does not satisfy everyone's taste, instead of being very flavorful, one flavor must be chosen. Because each person is a different taste, and no one likes tasting the same flavor all the time. (That sounded perverted)

Choose one single trait, ANY trait, and stick with it. "But my character is more complicated." Honey, they all are, just stick to a single trait.

I like to go with the inner person outer person rule. The outer person is the personality they show to the world. The inner person is WHY the outer person exists.

In order, the outer person may be: hot headed, attention hog, slutty, quiet, or adventures.

While the inner person may be: Unsure how to make people like him, doesn't like being ignored, wants to prove to her parents that they failed, abused as a child and unsure what to speak about, or never knew how wonderful life was until they left home.

Y'see people are like onions, there are many layers to all of us. We only ever see the outer layer, but the inner layers are what made the outer layer grow.

COMMANDMENT III: Just because their life is shitty, it doesn't mean we should feel sorry for them. Just because your character's parents died in a fire, on their birthday, after they left a letter saying how much they hate their kid, it doesn't mean we will instantly like the character. Nobody likes complainers, nobody likes whiners. Life is a tragedy, but pity is not something we should give all the time. And sulking is not how we should live all the time.

It's alright if a tragedy makes your character behave a certain way, (like the onion advice I mentioned) but your entire character can't revolve around a single tragedy. "I'm going to betray all my friends, family and pets because I have a debt of twenty dollars to pay." Don't blow tragedies out of proportion.

[Mixtape Ghost N]

Very good. I tell people this stuff all the time, but they don't really listen to me. lol

[Vilageidiotx]

About commandment two, you need to be careful with the 'single trait' rule because you run the risk of creating a stock character. This isn't to say that stock characters are always bad - they can be useful, and the simpler your writing style is the better it is to use them since stock characters compliment easy reading. At the same time, you have to remember that people are quite complicated. Our personalities shift depending on prejudices and comforts, we change with time and through experience, and the way we imagine ourselves is not always consistent with our actions. We are naturally inconsistent. I suppose you can imagine personality as an average of our behavior, or a line plotted on a graph of our actions.

What you need to do if you want to make good characters is try to be honest with yourself about what that character would do or think in any given situation. Hell, you really don't need any commandments if you can master this. Dr. Manhattan, after all, breaks the first commandment in the extreme, but the author's ability to extrapolate how his abilities would effect his behavior makes him an interesting character.

Really, the most important thing is to never make a Mary Sue. Don't create a character who is just an avatar of whatever random shit you think of. Develop them instead, and see what you can learn about them in the process.

[axleonex]

I meant single trait as in distinctive personality. 1 over encompassing personality. By no means did I want to imply that characters should be like a mass effect shephard that only picks renegade choices every time. Nobility can come out of villains during times of need, just as coldness can come out of heroes during times of hopelessness. People can still be uniquely distinct with any encompassing personality umbrella given.

And of course, just as onions do, more layers can be grown to wrap over the personality of the character. Time changes people, and change is the only thing consistent in humans. I guess I didn't add that as a 4th commandment because most RPs never last long enough to see changes like that occur.

(I haven't watched watchmen, is it safe to assume that Dr. Manhattan has some personal problems alongside his omnipotence?)

[NuttsnBolts]

What you have described is a Mary Sue.

Mary Sue

See Mary-Sue. A female fanfiction character who is so perfect as to be annoying. The male equivlalent is the Marty-Stu. Often abbreviated to "Sue". A Mary Sue character is usually written by a beginning author. Often, the Mary Sue is a self-insert with a few "improvements" (ex. better body, more popular, etc). The Mary Sue character is almost always beautiful, smart, etc... In short, she is the "perfect" girl. The Mary Sue usually falls in love with the author's favorite character(s) and winds up upstaging all of the other characters in the book/series/universe. There are several main types of Mary Sue:

Victim!Sues: The Victim!Sue is your whiny, wimpy, pathetic female character who can't seem to do much of anything except cry and get herself into trouble that the romantic interest of the fic has to rescue her from.

Warrior!Sues: The Warrior!Sue is usually loud, obnoxious and (of course) an amazing warrior. She'll usually have some tragic past that led her to become a warrior, and she'll upstage all of the Canonical characters with her mad Sueish powerz.

Mage!Sue: Similar to the Warrior!Sue, the Mage!Sue has amazing stregnth in magic, or has a magical power that nobody else has. She'll usually wind up upstaging all of the magical characters of the series.

Punk!Sue: Also called Noncomformist!Sue or Goth!Sue, the Punk!Sue is usually written by female beginners in the 11-15 age group. The Punk!Sue is loud, obnoxious, annoying and generally the type of person who you'd want to send off to boot camp for six months. The Punk!Sue almost always has angst coming out of her ears and isn't really a bad person, she's just oh!-so-angry at whatever tragic past the author has chosen to give her. The Punk!Sue is based on what the 11-15 year old author thinks is "cool" and wishes she could be. This includes Evil!Sues.

Misfit!Sue: This includes all Sues who are supposedly geeks, nerds, misfits, etc. Usually, the Misfit!Sue doesn't start out as inhumanly beautiful, but winds up getting a makeover and finding out she had the potential to be a guy-magnet (or girl-magnet, depending on the genre) all along. Also includes the "My parents want me to do this but I want to do that and it's not fair!!one!" type of Sue. Usually, this Sue is very bookish and smart, but will find some sort of physical talent nobody expected and become a star as a result.

Another thing to note is that a Sue will usually have a completely off-the-wall name, like "Viquetoria". The more wierd and pretentious the name of the character, the more likely it is that she's a Sue.

Finally, Sues often have wierd, improbable or impossible bloodlines. A secret half-elf child of Elrond and a nameless human would be an example of this. A character who was Dumbledore's grandchild and Tom Riddle's daughter would be another example.

Thats off urban dictionary, but the basic summary is that a character needs to have depth, and needs to be realistic. By real I am refering to the chances that would occur to make that character if the events it experienced happened in real life. A person could be a trained assassin by the age of 21, but they more than likely would miss out on other basic skills like cooking, art, being an good sports player, friends, maybe even basic reading skills.

Those character creators in games (eg: Fallout's S.P.E.C.I.A.L.) are probably the best way to create a good character. You could be a super hero in strength, but your charisma or intelligence would be next to nothing.