About their characters

I had a real soft spot for PkmnTrainerYellows old PTA character Valorie Ryder, they were a really well written teenage girl. I feel like that's a hard mark to hit - even if the writer happens to BE a teenage girl. It's so easy to sort of push too far and almost enter the realm of parody, y'know?

I used to write with a guy who had a spellsword type character in a fantasy setting and he was great, a hotheaded young mage who had a sword that was so heavily enchanted it was effectively a wand. Anytime he had to actually use it AS a sword he'd get pissed off because it would mess up all the sigils and stuff, so he'd have to strip all the enchantments off of it and put them back on again. Took him days.

Also played with someone (still one of my best friends) who had a catgirl character. Her whole thing was that she was a doctor putting together a thesis about cat people. This was in an MMO where everyone had their own backstory, so someone playing a catgirl could be saying they were a mutant, or an alien, or whatever they wanted. So they would arrange IC interviews between their catgirl and these other cat people to ask them all about their origins, their family etc. They were trying to see if there was a common origin they didn't know about. It could never come to a conclusion of course because some of these players were... not the best, and doing that thing of playing a cat person who is basically a sex object, but I always thought it was interesting that they took this odd MMO trope and started playing around with it. It really inspired me, so I got into a habit of deliberately making characters from concepts I felt were overused (robots, vampires, angels, fairies etc.) and trying to put a spin on them so they stood out. I got some great characters out of it - some AWFUL failures - and a really good friend to collaborate with.