Thread:DarkInfinitus/@comment-32712012-20201211194716/@comment-32712012-20201222053425

DarkInfinitus wrote: I'm sorry for not being there yesterday, I was too distracted by other things to notice 😅 It's okay, I've been pretty busy/distracted as well "^^

DarkInfinitus wrote: Alright, I'm super confused on if my characters should be light-hearted and simple or dark and complex. My suggestion on this would be to split the story into two versions: a light one and a dark one. That way, you can have as many light ideas in the light one as you want and have as many dark ideas in the dark one as you want without having to worry that the tones of your different ideas will conflict.

DarkInfinitus wrote: Also, I always have these grand ideas I want for my characters and I don't know how to roll them back, which then I type them out, then realizing how horrendous the execution was, which I then redo, redo, redo, redo. On that, I'd suggest simply toning down the magnitude/drama/scale of the ideas somewhat so that they can all be used together (albeit in the two separate stories, but together with the other ideas for a given story), allowing you to use them all in ways that hopefully won't seem so horrendous that they need constant removal and replacement. Let me explain:

So for example, currently, William decides to make Sophia unhappy for stealing his thunder, leading to him taking actions that include burning her artwork, all while Sophia is completely oblivious to the purpose of William's actions and ultimately has to cure him at the end out of the goodness of her heart. On the other hand, a previous version of the page (I can't find the diff, so I may have gotten a few of the details wrong) included Sophia getting mad at William and trying to kill him, leading to him mortally wounding her before healing her out of the goodness of his heart. These two versions of the page are mutually incompatible, as they assume entirely different things about the characters of William and Sophia. HOWEVER:

Suppose you were to make each of these incidents much milder. Say, William acting on his jealousy of Sophia only involves him stealing a favorite item of hers (perhaps the artwork), then returning it after she confronts him over this, while Sophia getting mad at William only involves her, say, getting into a bit of a fight with William that leads him to perhaps knock her out, then feel bad and heal her. Neither of these incidents are now conflict with each other, as they don't assume such drastic things about the characters (them being perfectly angelic/murderous/etc.).

Note that this is purely an example and you aren't required to use either of these incidents, especially not in the way I put them. This is just to illustrate an approach that you could take that would hopefully give you a more satisfying result than what's currently going on.

All this would hopefully also resolve a current conflict that I've noticed involving flipping back and forth between whether William or Sophia is the worse person and which is the better one. Combining all ideas into one or two stories would hopefully resolve this conflict by marking both characters as the morally grey/imperfect characters they are described as in their infoboxes while giving you enough room to play around with the story ideas you want.

I hope that some all of this will help you write these characters/stories.

Please let me know what you think of this!

Thanks!