Nov 05 2009
Non-Uniform Reactions: From the One, To the Many
Yesterday, I started talking about non-uniform reactions, or differentiating between different characters’ attitudes to the same person. But that doesn’t take into account internal variation—who says that one person’s going to have the same reaction to a whole bunch of different characters? Not I, not by a long shot.
I tend to take these on a case by case basis, since I’m usually trying to get into the reacting character’s head. It’s easy to start with the same sorts of basics as with differentiating multiple characters’ reactions: overall personality compatibility, shared history, that sort of thing. But once you’re through those, you’re going to want to get more closely into the character’s head, start figuring out who’s seen as different from whom and why.
One thing you might want to look at is qualities and priorities. Your reacting character probably values certain aspects of character and has little use for others, prioritizes some things and sees others as a waste of time. So sure, she’s showing disdain for both these characters here, but in one case it’s because she values loyalty and competence and he’s shown precious little of either, while she can neither fathom why nor respect the fact that the other one would choose love over duty in a heartbeat.
How do these different people interact with her plans? That’s likely to make a difference in and of itself. Often, a character will tend to have more positive feelings towards someone who can help her than one who can’t, and towards one who will help her as opposed to one who won’t. But then you have the times when that conflicts with the rest of her attitude: one character might be useful in the future, sure, but if she doesn’t like him to begin with that might only make it worse. As Buccaneer’s Guild pointed out indirectly yesterday, you’re also going to want to take comparative status into account: not just how the character reacts to the other characters, but whether her internal reaction matches her external reaction, whether it’s allowed to, and how she feels about that.
What about old debts and grudges; how do they play in? Sure, a character’s probably going to feel better towards someone who’s done something big for her…. unless, of course, they never let her forget about it, or won’t let her pay them back, or the like. How do her personality, her compatibility with the other’s personality, and/or good or ill done to each other in the past, affect her dealings with someone who should be a hereditary enemy or who did That One Thing that she feels she shouldn’t be able to forgive?
One important thing to remember is that there isn’t always an obvious link between one character’s feelings about another and the other character’s feelings about the first. Just because she loathes him doesn’t mean he has to hate her; just because she thinks of him as her favored apprentice and possible successor doesn’t mean he has to like her as a teacher. Not only do these imbalances make it more interesting, but they themselves can further affect the reacting character’s opinion of another character by interacting with her personality and the rest of the tangle-up. His unwillingness to mirror her hostility might soften her attitude, but it might also lead to further attempts to provoke him, or to something else entirely.
The end result, if you’re willing to do this for all the important character reactions, is a lot more depth and variety than you’d get from approaching everyone’s feelings towards other characters as being fundamentally the same. Removing the uniformity from the characters’ reactions to each other makes them more real and considerably more interesting. Give it a try!
