[prompt] [ooc] i'm using this icon because the conspicuously convenient can is funny, damn it.
What about your character drew you in as a writer; what is it that you want to explore with them?
One of the most obvious things--to me--is that more seems to be implied about Martel, by characters or situationally, than is actually ever outright stated. Kay's said to me that he was the villain; that was his role, that's what we got to see. And it's true! We also saw reflection on who he'd been before that, and the impact that had on attitudes towards him during the course of the trilogy (and the trilogy that follows). The vendetta between Sparhawk and Martel isn't two dudes on opposite sides of the fence; it's deeply personal because they grew up together, they were close, they cared about each other. There's a ton of backstory to who and what Martel is, and a lot of implications about his personality and circumstance that I found pretty fascinating and wanted to tinker with and explore.
He is, unmistakably, the villain. He does terrible things that he knows full well are wrong and doesn't really try to justify himself beyond a certain amount of bitterness towards his family--and he does consider them to be his family. It's interesting, though, how self-aware he seems to be. He says it himself in his final hours--"I made my choice. I won't demean myself by changing it now."
This is one of the major cornerstones of his characterisation; his single-minded intensity, his refusal to back down when he knows that he's wrong. There are hints dropped all through the series that Martel regrets the choices he made, and it's painfully obvious he's not working with the people he works with out of any particular loyalty or even civility. He holds everyone around him in contempt and doesn't bother to hide that from them. He's described frequently as being an 'intense' person; in a canon where the baseline for everybody as far as that goes is set pretty high, the fact that these people notice and point it out in him says a lot about how significant it is. He's ferociously intelligent, off-and-on very powerful mystically speaking, and such a bamf that he is handicapped and aware of the moment when the fight turns out of his favor several steps before the killing strike comes in order to lose a battle with someone who will later turn out to have basically been a god the entire time.
He's vain, prideful, horrifically bitter, full of regret, lonely, angry, and obsessed with the family he often perceives as having rejected him. And despite how obvious it is that he knows his choices were the wrong ones to make, when he finally dies he does it without explicitly repenting anything. He regrets. He clearly hurts.
True story: I decided several months ago that I was going to pick up a character from the Elenium/Tamuli trilogies, but I couldn't decide which. I considered Martel, because--as I elaborated above--I find him to be a really fascinating character, he's an interesting mix of Eddings' typical archetypes. Of course, it's kind of a bitch to PB a six foot plus knight in his forties with long white hair, so after a while I gave up on that and tried to decide on a different character instead--I considered a bunch, because the difficulty with his canon is that nearly all the characters interest me like this. But I couldn't settle on anyone, and trying to find a PB for him turned into a kind of 'goddamn it, I am going to do this just to prove it can be done', and one day out of the blue I stared at my computer and yelled JULIAN SANDS!!!! because I'm a spaz and a half. And thus: Martel was born to the internets.
What I want to explore with him is, in a nutshell: what if that wasn't the end for him? What if somewhere else he was alive--had died, had been through all that, but was back and had to deal with his own fallout? ICly he describes it as being held to his deathbed regret, which is a pretty on the nose way of putting it. The idea I had and how I play it is that no, he never backed down, he never changed his mind, he died, but that's where it is: he did die. It ended. It was over. So what I'm looking to explore with him is how he handles a new beginning--there is no such thing as a fresh start and a clean slate, particularly given the emotional weight, which is part of what makes it so interesting.
prompt: 1.5
word count: 750