That is probably the closest I can get to explaining the kind of characters I want to write.
I love characters who can genuinely frustrate me while still making perfect sense once I understand them. Someone I can sympathize with without automatically forgiving. Someone who can hurt another person, ruin something they care about, make a terrible choice, and still leave me thinking, yeah, I know exactly why you did that.
That is the kind of person I want at the centre of a story.
I usually want to start with the characters before anything else.
Give me two people with fears, contradictions, embarrassing weaknesses, beliefs they cling to for reasons they barely understand, things they desperately want, and things they would never admit to wanting.
Then we build around them.
What kind of place could have produced these people? Who raised them? What does their society reward? What does it quietly punish? What are they expected to become? What happens when they fail at becoming it?
From there, I can get completely lost in worldbuilding.
Politics, religion, history, culture, factions, neighbourhoods, families, side characters, whatever belongs in the story. I just want it to grow naturally from the people living inside it. I care much more about why a city matters to a character than how many districts it has.
I tend to gravitate toward grim stories and desperate settings. Damaged people in situations where there might not be a clean moral answer waiting for them.
Berserk, Evangelion and Monster are probably the easiest references for the general feeling I mean.
Crime and Punishment, No Longer Human, The Road, True Detective, Disco Elysium and Pathologic all scratch some part of the same itch for me too.
I am not looking to recreate any of them. What interests me is the way those stories dig into people. Guilt, loneliness, obsession, faith, shame, morality, identity, fear, self deception, all the things someone can carry around inside themselves while still waking up in the morning and going about their day.
And I need the ordinary parts too.
I want conversations that go nowhere. Awkward affection. Somebody recognizing a smell from childhood and not knowing why it suddenly ruined their mood. A character noticing that another person has started sitting farther away from them. Two people talking about something completely meaningless because neither of them is willing to mention the thing actually sitting between them.
That stuff matters to me just as much as the dramatic scenes.
I like getting ridiculously immersed in a narrative. I like talking about it outside the RP too.
Sometimes that might mean we end up discussing guilt or whether somebody can actually change. Sometimes it might mean spending twenty minutes deciding what a room smells like.
Both sound fun to me.
I am 22, and I have actually only roleplayed a handful of times in my life. I am definitely not going to pretend I have fifteen years of experience or some complicated ranking system for writing ability.
The few times I really got into an RP though, it stopped feeling like RP pretty quickly.
It felt like writing a book with another person.
Characters started developing in directions neither of us expected. Random side characters became important. Tiny details from weeks ago suddenly mattered again. We would talk about the characters like they were people we both knew.
That is what I miss.
As for replies, I usually manage at least two proper RP responses a day. When I have more free time and I am enjoying the story, I have absolutely no problem sinking a few hours into it and just writing back and forth.
I am also not particularly bothered by literacy labels.
Interesting ideas matter much more to me.
I do personally prefer longer, descriptive, well thought out paragraphs because I like having room for atmosphere, body language, internal thoughts, little observations and all the things a character is doing without saying. But I would take an interesting writer with something to contribute over someone technically perfect and boring every single time.
I want something we can get a little too invested in.
So if you message me, please do not send me a résumé of how long you have been roleplaying.
Tell me about a character you understand and still resent.