Don't get involved with someone you can't talk about your crushes with.

[captlebubbles]

So one of the things that's really important to me with Hope and the Dark Destroyer is making it clear that with all of my villains, regardless of their motives and their backstories and no matter how sympathetic they are, all of them made the conscious decision that "it doesn't matter how many people get hurt, as long as I get what I want".

Comments

[captlebubbles]

All a fictional character needs to be is interesting. I like Felix because he's an irredeemable piece of shit, but also one that doesn't need a sympathetic backstory, and because he's charming. Yeah, he attempted to commit genocide on an entire planet, but he was also charming while he did it. He was an interesting character and I enjoy that. On the flipside, writing a character who is a bastion of incorruptible pure pureness and keeping them interesting is hard. Not that no one should, and not that it's impossible, but it's really easy to make them boring.

Sometimes I think of myself as a what would happen if Hope and Dark fused (Steven Universe reference, but I'm sure you get the basic idea) but sometimes I think a fusion of the two of them would be more stable than me because he wouldn't so caught up in an entanglement of bitter self-loathing. The parts of them that were Hope would help balance the parts that were Dark, instead of constantly having to keep them in check, and vice versa.

I loved Emma and I'm so glad I found a place to put her where she'll fit so neatly.

[wolfy_writing]

Yes! It's okay to enjoy a fictional character as fiction because they're charming! Or awful in a really interesting way! It's okay to feel sympathy for their problems even if they did really awful things, because they're pretend people who pretend-did awful things to other pretend people! As long as no one's literally trying to justify doing harmful things in real life based on pretend people, it's all good!

I think they would probably be less hard on themselves, because if you're used to thinking of that side of yourself as another person, the instinct is to bring the sympathy and understanding you would bring to another person. Like I could see the Hope bits having to keep the Dark bits in check, and still having the bitter and angry thoughts in fused forms, but also not judging or blaming themselves for it? Because "I'm keeping his supervillain side in check, and if that means letting him have the nasty thoughts and feelings but keeping him from acting destructively on them, that's plenty good enough" seems to flow naturally.