Intentionally not listing Daria until she dies, as my feelings for her are going to vary pretty wildly depending on how everything goes down.
- [+] since everyone else is doing one I guess I will do it too
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12. David Meramec
David and Simon's profiles are the ones I was probably proudest of going into V4, which is why I find it faintly fascinating that they end up being my weakest V4 characters. When I wrote David, I had only one basic concept: I liked the idea of him hurtling from thread to thread. I threw him into the game with literally zero plans attached to him, and just wanted to see when he'd become. Unfortunately, the answer is, "Not much": his central conceit of roaming from thread to thread doesn't take him very far, and he dies without accomplishing much in one of my feebler attempts at an ending. Some of the traits I used in David I would reuse with Tyler, to mixed reception.
11. Simon Grey:
I said above that David and Simon's profiles were the ones I was proudest of going into V4, in very different ways. David was a well-rounded character with a more-expansive pre-game who I wanted to organically grow as circumstances warranted. Simon, by contrast, had a specific aim from the outset: he would be, very self-consciously, a hero, and would enter the game as such. Circumstances sort of neutered my intentions for the character (though his influence on Raidon continues to exert an effect throughout the game), and I do love the dual circumstances of his death: he gets his heroic, noble last-stand against a big-name villain, but one of the people he died protecting betrays and kills the other. I think it's sort of a meta comment on SOTF as a whole?
Bonus fact: Simon Grey/Naoko Raidon/Mirabelle Nesa are my default RPG characters (to the point that my Pokemon Trainer is usually Simon and his rival is usually Raidon, and in Dragon Age, Mass Effect, and other RPGs my different characters are usally Simon/Raidon/Mirabelle)
10. Tom Swift:
Tom is the closest thing to a self-insert I've ever done (I moved some grief trauma stuff to earlier in my life and played around with the idea of what it would be like if I coped with my grief with substances rather than therapy), and I really enjoyed writing parts of him. But I think doing a self-insert may have been kind of impossible for me? I think I kept trying to second-guess what parts of my writing were wish fulfillment, or self-deprecation, or unrealistic. There are parts of his dialogue I really like (his death post, in particular, and his first and last threads)
9. Xavier Contel:
Parts of Xavier were the most fun I've had writing a character. I basically turned all of my nerdy qualities up to 10 and wrote a character who embraced my full nerd/weeaboo side. Every reference Xavier drops is from a piece of media that's important to me (I have a dumb ability to encode narrative information into my head, including quotes, and never lose it), and I enjoyed his interactions across the aboard. There's no part of Xavier's story I don't like, but he never found his group, and so I never fully found my groove with him.
(WEIRD SIDENOTE: David, Simon, Xavier, and Tom are all characters who take big chunks of their personality from mine, so the fact that I'm not as-proud of them is probably a weird psychological reveal? On the other hand, they're also characters whose big failure seems to be how I misuse them. Anyways)
8. Eliza Luz
The concept of the Luz family in general is something I'm very proud of, and it produced a lot of strong characters. Lizzie is actually one of those characters, and I enjoyed writing her quite a bit. But as is a constant problem for me, I never quite managed to put her where she needed to be. Working with NAFT was the closest I ever got her to really shining, and I think if I could have found the right characters for her to bounce off of she could have been something special. But from beginning to end, she never quite manages to land. The fact that she ranks this high on the list is probably a credit to how much I enjoyed writing her, even through my failures to use her appropriately.
7/6. Karen Idel:
So while writing this list, I made a discovery: my list is largely determined not by how I feel about the quality of my writing, but by the quality of the RPs these characters were involved in. Karen and Terra are roughly tied for me, probably because they were both characters whose endings were largely pre-determined, and who I was heavily involved in OOC planning to make those endings work. Karen was also the victim of some disruption that was not her fault (given how densely interwoven the narrative was, the V5 board shutdown really screwed with the escape group). Her group had some strong scenes even with that disruption, and I was fully prepared for both the possible success and the probable failure of her attempt. All-around, Karen is probably my best work in V5.
7/6. Terra Johnson:
The fact that Terra's tied with Karen is ENTIRELY because of Children of Cain, in which some other fabulous handlers bring their own fabulous characters to the mix and the resulting clusterfuck feels like it gives every character a chance to shine. Terra's got some character concepts I'm kind of proud of and the planning that went into it means every character gets a chance to shine in a way that feels organic and clicks together in a beautiful, dynamic way. I think Karen is the stronger of the two characters overall, and I had more total fun writing her, but thus far in V7 I have not matched the highs of planning Children of Cain with everyone. Kami, Brackie, Murder, and Ryuki brought the thunder.
5. Alex Tarquin
Big surprise, my melodramatic, metanarrative-building villain managed to rank pretty high on my list. Alex's last name comes from an Order of the Stick villain (first name Tarquin) whose whole gimmick is that he uses his awareness of the fantasy medium he's part of to build his plans, and the seed of that idea--of being cognizant of one's villain status, and using it for a larger purpose--is what I wanted to achieve with Alex. As I developed Alex, that idea got played with a little: not just villainy as its own purpose (independent of winning the game) but villainy as a coping mechanism, self-consciously adapting the tropes of a stereotypical villain to live with guilt and suffering. Alex could have been unbearable, but fortunately he got a chance to play off strong characters (I owe Toxie a huge debt, as Alex's repeated clashes with Crowley really helped define the character) and grow from there. Walking the line between "unrepentant killer," "gentleman blood knight," and "scared theater kid playing pretend" was really fun.
4. Tyler Lucas
I believe Tyler may be one of my more-unpopular characters, and I understand why. Tyler was a big experiment on my part, and sort of gag on the nature of SOTF. I think a fair number of handler's don't just take into account what another character is saying or doing, but what they're thinking (I myself do this all the time). On one level, this makes sense: words, deeds, and thoughts in-post add up to an impression our characters might also get (so, for instance, if a killer is pretending to be sympathetic while plotting our deaths, we may notice something off about their actions, or if a character seems gruff and dangerous but their private narrative is panicked we might pick up an edge of fear). But in Tyler's case I wanted to make a character that other people would actually have to work to understand: big, dangerous, violent, and terse, but with more going on than most people might see (he got a chance to show more of this as the narrative went on). There's stuff I never got to do with the character (for instance, one big plot hook that I never got to expand on is that Tyler actually really likes the Pattons, and actually had a crush on Eliza), but writing him was a blast, and I feel like I enjoyed the threads I got to do with him.
Tyler also has one of my biggest SOTF regrets attached to him: he didn't get the death he needed. Tyler really needed to clash with one of his recurring enemies to close his arc properly, but Travis Webster was sadly unavailable.
3. Mirabelle Nesa:
Mirabelle suffers a bit from being handled by a 19 year-old man who had some issues writing women, but whatever the weaknesses of her author, they're more than made up with by the quality of her RP partners. I went in with very few plans for Mirabelle (besides being "aggressive Hiroki Sugimura") and in this case my complete lack of plans was amply rewarded: by Hollyquin with Garrett (establishing a rivalry that could grow as the characters grew), by story with Liz Polanski (whose radical act provided a focus for Belle's story that was otherwise missing), by Samantha (who provided a moral conflict without a clear solution), and by Murder with Baines (who gave Belle the perfect tragic ending). Belle was fun to fight and is still fun to reread, and there were times when I was writing her that I was having so much fun I bragged to my friends about it.
2. Tara Behzad:
Tara has earned her position on this list only because of the grief she caused various members of staff at various stages of her development. Moving on.
...But seriously folks, Tara's profile is absurd, and that's the toned-down version after the special-snowflake nonsense I submitted to BetaKnight for pre-game. I knew Tara was going to be complicated, because I was trying to do a lot of things with her character. She was intentionally supposed to be a throwback to pre-made players from previous versions, which required putting things in her profile I knew were dicey as a misdirect. She was supposed hatch and execute a complicated, harrowing, and dangerous escape attempt entirely on her own, with only her own resources, which required her to have an expansive past. She was supposed to reference huge swathes of SOTF, including my own work. And, with all of those narrative functions done, she had to function as a character worth reading.
I think I succeeded at that goal, though it was a close thing. I wrote The Inferno in what I swear to God felt like a fugue state (back when I thought V6 might be my last version). Most of the names high on this list are here because of how much they were to RP as and with other people, and there are some solid RP sections in Tara's story, but honestly she's here because I think I tried something difficult, struggled, and pulled it off to my personal satisfaction.
1. Naoko Raidon
Raidon remains the character I'm proudest of four versions later, and the one I had the most fun writing. This comes from a combination of factors, but the main one is this: I achieved my fundamental goal with Raidon (a character who is empathetic, has a staunch moral compass, and is a full-fledged player in spite of these factors) in a way that dramatically departed from my original goals thanks to the intervention of other characters. Raidon was intended to have a grudging, agonized descent into full-fledged villainy (to the point where I had rough sketches for him joining the Arthro Task Force if he happened to win V4), with potential to encounter Simon and either submit to being killed or cement his villain turn by killing him.
But then there were two threads back to back: The Quiet Lives of Baron Saturday, with story's Mizore Soryu; and No Turning Back, with sunnybunny's Scott McGregor and Jonny's Julian Avery. Scott sent Raidon down the path I'd planned, but Mizore and Julian changed EVERYTHING about the character, by giving him people to work off of in a way that just felt incredible. When I think of V4, I legitimately have a mental image of Julian, Raidon, and Mizore running around yelling at each other and constantly stopping to save and protect one another.
There are so many good moment in V4, far beyond the ones I'm involved in with Raidon, and part of why I enjoyed it so much was that I think Raidon fit into the mold of what was happening in V4 in a way that gave characters who interacted with him a lot to work with, and that gave me as a handler a lot to do, react to, and change. But having to explore Raidon's core dynamics by having him constantly argue with an antihero vigilante and a staunch pacifist (and, later, having him and Fioriboy's Maxwell Lombardi have such a profound ongoing effect on one another) made him into something far different that I intended, and what is probably still the most fun I've ever had in any version.
). Sven was built to function read either with or without all the wild wacky stuff, and I think he does this well. Unfortunately, he was also built to have a little more direction than he ultimately manifested, and while I'm very pleased with his vibe, character, and the jokes/references/meta shenanigans I got up to with him, I think he's got an inverse-Aaron going on where he doesn't have much of a plot, especially if you're not onboard for the cosmic metaphysical time loop deal. Fortunately, I care less about that, but a lot of my other kids have stuff going on that edges him some.
(Adopted from Dannyrulx)
