Ok, it’s not really THAT much of a secret. A few weeks back one of the editors for WoW.com contacted me about writing a guest post.

It’s live today, and you can read it here.

The hardest part about doing this was definitely the word count. I had another point I wanted to make, and was already 200 words past my limit.  Oops! Everything else about the process was quite painless, and I’m pretty pleased to see my work tagged around at other places. It’s kind of a cool thing as a writer.

I hope you enjoy the post, and I’ll have a Friday post up here a little bit later.

If you’re visiting here from WoW.com for the first time via my post today, welcome and hello!

P.S. I didn’t choose the image of Rhonin as the header for the article (I forgot to choose an image. Oops again!), but it cracked me up when I saw it. Tee hee hee.

***Thanks for reading this post from Too Many Annas. May the Loot-Fu be with you***

Guest Post – Lore based characters who aren’t Mary-Sues

A Peek Behind the Curtain (part 1)

As usual, Falconesse is setting up a fantastic post series that I’m greatly looking forward to reading. (If you didn’t know, Falconesse and Bricu are both officers of my guild – the Wildfire Riders – so getting to see the inner workings behind a really awesome and recent RP event is pretty spiffy.)

I’ll see you guys a little bit later this week!

***Thanks for reading this post from Too Many Annas. May the Loot-Fu be with you***

Peeking Behind the Curtain

***Thanks for reading this post from Too Many Annas. May the Loot-Fu be with you***

Guest Post: Keeping the Spark Alive

When I was a kid, one of my favorite games was So You Want to Be a Hero?  I loved the idea of some official body of heroes that was taken only halfway seriously by everyone in the world.  It had a meta-humor that appealed to me, but I was always disappointed that there wasn’t a companion game series called So You Want to Be a Villain?

I have always been far more fascinated with villains in stories than in the heroes.

This is a bit strange because I was a straightlaced Momma’s Boy growing up, always afraid of breaking the Rules.  I don’t think that my fascination even comes from any desire to shrug off the shackles of conservative behavior and vicariously let my hair down.  No, I think it’s because the villains were ACTIVE.

In the stories I read and movies I watched, the villains were always the ones with a plan, taking an active role in how the universe around them was shaped.  The heroic side was always merely reacting to the bad guys, and because of this were often less fully realized than their black-hatted counterparts.  The good guys were not only kind of boring, but even worse, they were PASSIVE.  Think about the most popular of the heroes of the Star Wars trilogy – Han Solo.  Why is he the most popular?  He’s active and knowledgeable, because he’s just a little bit bad.

When I hit an age where I began to craft my own stories, it was often easier for me to focus on the antagonist of a piece than the protagonist, because in the common tropes of speculative fiction, it’s the antagonist that is actually be PROactive.  They kick the story off and drive it to the necessary places.  While occasionally stories appear in which the good guys are the driving force, this is far rarer than the reverse.  They are generally just trying to get the world back to normal.  As a writer, it was easier for me to guide a story through the eyes of the person shaping events, and in time, I (hopefully) became good at it.

My first real story based character in the World of Warcraft was a villain.

I rolled on an rp server a few weeks after the game came out in ‘04, and quickly got involved in the forum rp scene developing there.  There were many stabs at villainy back in those days, but I quickly became frustrated with them, because I thought they were all BAD.  Not bad as in evil, but bad as in poorly done.  My frustration led me to challenging myself to see if I could do better, and one epic storyline and a few thousands screams of exasperation from my victims later, I feel that I may have some tips for people when it comes to crafting villains.

Without further ado, here are my basic steps to crafting villainy.

1.    There is no such thing as a villain.

Whatever character you are designing is first and foremost a person.  They had parents, acquaintances, some type of life prior to the story that defines them as a person.  Very few people in life define themselves as villains.  The good guy or bad guy in a situation often depends entirely on who has the best PR.  Don’t think of the character as a villain, think of them as a person with a role to fill in a narrative.  Make them human, so that people will care when you kill them.

2.    Give your villain a goal.

An overarching goal is possibly the single most defining feature any antagonist can have.  It is what separates them from the rest of the flock of generic heroes out there.  The villain has a goal, and possible a plan to achieve it.  They do not exist to drywash their hands and laugh evilly.  They want to accomplish SOMETHING.

3.    Make your villain comparable in power to the threat they are posed by anyone trying to stop them.

Stories are boring if one side of a struggle is vastly over or under powered.  Bells and whistles are not what will make your villain cool.  It is their backing character that people will latch onto, not their fancy black Cape of Head-Shrinking.  It’s important to note that power does not always come in the form of a magic sword or huge fireball.  Just being smart, or tenacious, or willful can often give someone great power in a situation.

4.    Eschew the evil laughter.

Unless your story is firmly rooted in the campy adventure style of the 30s and 40s, you don’t need to identify your antagonist as a villain by making them give off peals of laughter like lightning.  That is one of the worst forms of telling and not showing that is possible for an antagonist.  If you do your job well in telling the antagonist’s story, while people may identify with them, there will be no doubt in their minds what role the character has fulfilled.

5.    No evil for evil’s sake.

If you have followed step 1, your villain has a goal.  Make sure that every action they take sticks to that goal somehow.  If they are despoiling the countryside, or putting the hero into an elaborate deathtrap, make sure those actions actually serve some kind of commonsensical end.  If the motivation behind a villain’s actions isn’t clear, or is just non-existent, your villain becomes a cape-wearing caricature.  That is not to say that every villain needs to be obvious in what they do, which leads us into . . .

6.    Give us a little bit of mystery.

Never make a villain completely obvious.  A good story is often the slow revelation of the villain.  Just avoid mystery for mystery’s sake.  The art of the reveal is a difficult skill to pick up, and is done poorly all over the place.  90% of long arc television shows have adopted this mystery for mystery’s sake writing style, and it’s terrible.  Be more Count of Monte Cristo, less smoke monster from Lost.

7.    Be ok with losing.

Villains are defeated.  Most of the time, anyway.  That is part of their role within the structure of a story, and it is very important never to forget it.  At some point, your extremely cool dark character of forbidding terror will be foiled either by their own folly, or by the wits and strength of a do-gooder.  Them’s just the breaks, and if you accept it, you can make that defeat just as compelling as every single other part of your villain.

Armed with this set of basic thinking points, pretty much anyone can come up with and narrate a compelling villain.  Remember that the best villains are not the ones that are completely inscrutable in their evil, but rather the ones that we can all relate to.  There is far too much darkness in the human soul to need to invent any extra.

***Thanks for reading this post from Too Many Annas. May the Loot-Fu be with you***

Guest Post: Virtues of Villainy

It’s Not as Difficult as you Think!

A while back, Anna wrote a post called XX and XY in RP. It was about her difficulties with role-playing characters who were of the opposite gender to herself, and more generally about the difficulty of anyone role-playing cross-gender. Well, for those who followed Blogatelle, they’d know that my favourite character I made in World of Warcraft was a nervous gnomish girl named Fulthruttle McKenzie Winterspring. But it goes deeper than that. Most of my regular characters were female, only one of them (Baron Ligradi DeMontafe) was male,  and furthermore in most computer games, MU*s and even tabletop games, I’ve tended to play women more than men.

Why? I don’t know, to be honest. Something about women is simply more appealing to me than playing a man. Maybe it’s that it’s another level of escapism, an extra level of remove from who I am. But whatever it is, I’m here to tell you: Playing a cross-gender character convincingly isn’t as hard as you think it is.

A Quick Primer in Communication Theory, and why it matters.

Anna admits the weirdness inherent in finding it easier to play a well-behooved blue-skinned alien from another dimension than playing the Guy Next Door, but she explains her understanding of this problem succinctly:

Whether or not “gender” is correct, biological, chosen, culturally shaped, or whatever, gender exists in the real world. Night Elves, however, do not.

And she’s right. But why?

Let’s talk a little about talking. It’s easy to assume that talking and listening is a one step process.  I talk, and this speech is then picked up on by the person hearing it. Speaking is active, listening passive. But the reality is more complex than that. Think about it. The listener needs to pay attention to what someone says. You bring your own preconceptions to it. Biases creepy in and twist the original meaning. The end result can mean that what one person said is very different to what the other person actually hears.

This is one of the reasons why playing a non-human race works so nicely in World of Warcraft. You put your spin on what a, say, troll would be. Then the other person, seeing your troll character, thinks, “Oh cool, troll,” and begins interpreting your character as a troll. Really, unless you do something majorly brain-breaking, that’s how it works. If you start playing a troll as unusually eloquent, your opposite number usually won’t think, “Man, that’s not a troll” but “Huh, he’s an unusually eloquent troll!”

So, neat. We can see that in fact, role-play in Warcraft is somewhat self-reinforcing. But here’s the thing: This works for cross-gender role-play, too. If you see a female/male avatar, do you find yourself thinking, “Oh man. That’s got to be a guy/girl”? Of course you don’t, unless that (usually female) avatar is being ridiculously caricatured. So unless you’re dancing on mailboxes naked, or spending all your time talking about how hot you are, quit it. But apart from that, seriously, you’re fine.

I think the biggest issue people have with playing cross-gender isn’t being convincing, but being convinced that they are being convincing. You, after all, have direct access to your own thoughts, and those thoughts are, “Man, I’m being totally like myself here. This is guy think! No girl would ever be like this.” When in reality, they’re thinking, “OK, so she’s a bit tomboyish. Cool.” The reinterpretation kicks in. Instead of thinking you’re doing things badly, most people reinterpret to find a way to see your performance as good. You just need to roll with it.

Hints and Tips

So, with that in mind, here’s how I’d advise role-playing a cross-gender character. None of this is particularly stunning stuff, but just good, common sense.

• Relax. Seriously, this is the big one. Just relax, and trust you’re doing a good job. If you don’t let on, most people will believe you are.
• Don’t think gender. Think attributes and motivations. There’s no such thing as a male way of thinking, or a female way. We’re the products of our upbringing and society. So sure, maybe your male human paladin is gruff and stern, very masculine. Why? Because as a boy, he was quickly taught that emotion shouldn’t be shown to the enemy.  Now you have a hook for role-play, and can think not only about when to be gruff and stern, but when to not be. Or, conversely, maybe your female mage is very vain and appearance focused. Why? Because getting stolen glances from boys when growing up was a self-esteem booster. It makes her feel better. Now you know how someone can piss her off: When they ignore her. If you think of attributes and motivations, you’ll have a better comprehension of their character, and play them better. Or, to put it another way? Play people, not sexes.
• If you can’t play a man/woman in general, could you play one specifically? OK, so you’re still not feelin’ it. That’s fine. So here’s a question: Is there an established fictional character similar to the one you want to play? If so, then fine. Play that person. File the serial numbers off first, of course; find the core part of what you think makes that character cool and keep that while ditching the surplus. Find someone you do find masculine/feminine, and play them. It’s a perfectly valid technique.
• Finally, if all else fails, just don’t play a human man or woman. Who the hell is to say what gender politics are like amongst orcs? Who knows what a stereotypical gnome girl is like? How can you say for sure what the goblins expect of a man? Seriously, once you get into the non-human races, everything’s up for grabs.

But above all?

Just relax.

Kick back. Don’t worry. The odds are very good that nobody else believes you’re being unrealistic. The only barrier to playing cross-gender satisfyingly and convincingly is you.

***Thanks for reading this post from Too Many Annas. May the Loot-Fu be with you***

Guest Post: Convincing Cross-Gender Characters