Writing Blank Characters (or, when your fave only appears for ten seconds)

Watch me attempt to give writing tips like I'm a pro here, lmao, but hey, I thought this would help.

So, a while ago, some friends and I were talking about writing blank characters, especially because I really love writing blank characters. From the beginning of my fic escapades (...I'm only counting my time in the DHMIS fandom, because I refuse to count the fics I wrote at eight years old until I was twelve before I stopped because I swore fics off, and then got back into it again) I've always loved taking blank characters and writing for them, mostly because I want to see their potential used, and also because I'm very curious about them. But blank characters can be very hard to write sometimes, and I've only been getting by because of a) a ton of research - if you've read A Lullaby For Gods, you'll know I put so much work into all the characters, especially the blank ones, b) reading into a lot of canon scenes with the character, c) writing for yourself and not giving a damn about what others think and d) the magic trick of having a set personality base, a situation, and a reasonable reaction based off of the personality base.

Now, with blank characters with a reasonable amount of screentime, research and reading into canon scenes go hand in hand. As certain things  may not be stated outright in the canon material, if you want to write a blank character and you want to write them well, you're going to have to do a little bit of digging and a ton of analysis. Case in point, we have my Damara Megido from A Lullaby for Gods.

Damara is a tricky character to write in that the fandom (from what I've seen anyway) usually writes her as a needlessly angry character who swears a lot and is lewd, and while that's a facet of her, yes, that's not all she is, and that's not all she's supposed to be reduced to be. Damara's actions in the comic that be predominantly see are a result of Meenah's actions towards her, and of the rest of her team's treatment of her. To put it one way, from her end, she was treated like shit, and thus she lashed out at all of them because they'd hurt her before. But if you wind time back a little on that, it's reasonable to assume that Damara might have once been very sweet and kind, maybe even be a bit like Aradia who was curious about things, even if her humor was a little too morbid for human tastes.

A quick formula on how psychology is made up is that we a) emulate people around us - the more lasting the impact this person has on our life, the more likely we are to copy their actions, b) respond to certain people and situations differently due to past experiences and associations  and c) are able to change these responses but it would require a whole lot of effort, and that whole lot of effort sometimes makes someone snap. It's not always a bad snap, but there will be lapses of control.

This is how I approached Damara's character. As it's reasonable to assume she might have been a nice girl (she had a relationship and everything - I think it was with Rufioh, I might be misremembering) whose entire personality got warped when Meenah and her other friends ruined her life, then it is also understandable how she reacted to them when we saw her in the dream bubbles. She was lewd and crass, which I understood as something that could be taken as a 'shock them so they go away' kind of move, because if you shock people enough, there is a big possibility they will stay away from you, and for Damara, if her team stays away from her, then she doesn't have to remember all the awful things they've done to her / won't have to deal with whatever cruelty they deal to her in the future because she made them go away. From this, we can also expect her to act the same way if any situation / person reminds her of anything from her past that ended up in less than favourable situations.

Outside of those reminders, of course, we can also assume that Damara may be neutral to anyone else. I think I saw an observation once that she was reasonable to the Beta Kids (but wasn't to Karkat, but that was because she knew he was mutant, and the Sufferer's descendant), so if we go off from that, we can characterize her as someone who is neutral to strangers, but may have a short fuse, because when you have a lot of pent-up anger inside of you, even if it's there for other reasons, you tend to be irritable.

And along with irritation can come the feeling of wanting to be mean to others. Of course, it's not a feeling that's always there, but sometimes, there are bad days where you want to lash out at even your friends, and in one cut-out section of ALFG, I had a part from Damara's point of view that showed this - her patience was already wearing thin, and so when she was making her decisions, she was slightly irrational and irritable.

(After, of course, feeding Dirk some bullshit about wanting to see her friends too.

(As if.)

What a day. What a find!  

Still, she doesn’t tell Dirk. Logically, she knows it’s detrimental to their progress, but there’s just – something. Maybe it’s from the years of being ridiculed and mocked and abused and betrayed. She’s not quite ready to play fair yet, even with this.

(Maybe she wants to lash out and hurt others a little too, just a little, just a smidge, because her head is so loud and she is sick of - )

And another part, which is in the same section of the chapter, talks about her trust issues, the reasons for which should be fairly obvious due to what she's been through.

While Damara wouldn’t classify them as friends, not even acquaintances, because she’d tack ‘begrudging’ at the beginning of that first, she has been observant. More observant than Dirk has given her credit for. She knows that he goes over every single plan, every single detail, because he feels guilt over his past actions, and while his gift for planning would be deadly in some circumstances, he’s not in a good place right now, so he overthinks, and she has to push him forward. She knows that he is meticulous, almost to a fault. He tries his best to look presentable despite circumstances (and when they were still on the road, that had been difficult, but by the Empress, he tried his best), and he’d be damned into the furthest ring before he left a mess in his wake. She knows that he’s the kind of person who takes matters into his own hands because he doesn’t know who else he can trust to handle these situations.

Anxious. Perhaps even alone. He feels the only person he can rely on is himself, and in that regard, they are similar.

That last thought leaves a sour taste in her mouth because she’d never once want to be likened to Dirk Strider, but then again, perhaps that is why she understands him, even a little.

There is no one Damara can trust. She must take matters into her own hands because she can’t afford to squander trust on those who don’t deserve it. From the very beginning, she has been alone. From the very beginning, she has always stood by herself.

And directly after that is Damara implying that she is sick of certain feelings (or just feelings in general) because when you're functioning on anger, even low-level anger that's constantly ready to rise up, it can be very exhausting.

That is why she has to push Dirk forward, because they’ve built a shaky truce here, and he’s useful sometimes, but he hesitates too often because of guilt, guilt, and more, pesky, disgusting guilt – honestly, who needed that, these days? There’s only so much emotion to go around, why not pick something useful like anger? That gets things done.

Oh, and the reason why I write Damara as someone who is cunning, who would smile her way to getting what she wants is because canonically, she was willing to find and aid Lord English, and someone like her who has a lot of rage to unleash and a lot of revenge to exact probably spent a lot of time planning and plotting, and that definitely makes for a good actress who would do nearly everything to achieve a goal.

And another thing to take into account is that Damara, in Lullaby, mostly interacts with Dirk. She interacts with some of the side characters, and we usually see her acting, hustling people and being nice to them to convince them to get her to places, but most of her interactions are with Dirk. This is an important point because, someone's personality can appear different depending on who they're talking to.

In fact, in my notes for her in my google doc, I have a section for her interactions with Dirk.

-

[ copy-pasted from my google doc: ]

Damara Megido

Witch of Time

• Has no typing style, but rather speaks in Japanese, which is mostly bypassed in the first few chapters of her talking with Dirk, but since Dirk speaks Japanese, we see the translations in English.
• Is actually very sweet and kind to the kids (beta?), but hateful and angry to the trolls. 
• Currently very hateful, rude and snappy, but given as she was once a charming and sweet girl back on Beforus, there is still something salvageable about her, but if she is pushed over the edge without enough time to recover, it’s possible she will betray everyone for Lord English.
• Baaaasically, B. Again. 

[L] On playing off with Dirk Strider

• While Damara is shown to be sweet and kind, she dislikes the fact that Dirk Strider has a tendency for being controlling, thus putting a wedge between what could be a budding friendship. There’s also the fact that Dirk is not very empathetic, and the fact that Damara is frustrated and afraid of being on a new place where absolutely no one understands her, and having no idea why she is here in the first place. She’s lashing out like a scared animal, basically.
• She will calm down in time if Dirk can reach her, but will react negatively to seeing Alpha Trolls again.
• She will turn on her pottymouth if he angers her enough. Her defense mechanism is to bring on a shock factor.
• Dirk will try to over-analyze her and in the process anger her.

-

So that's an example of a character who has scarce canon material, but thankfully enough canon material to go on and fill in the blanks with reasonable headcanons. Because, let's be real, this is all actually just filling up character blanks with headcanons.

But then, we have characters who have screentime...but also nearly nothing to go on. One of my favorite characters that's like this is RK800-60 from Detroit: Become Human.

Now, like everyone else when I first got into D:BH and was dazzled by the pretty graphics, I pretty much just went 'I love Connor, I hate all his counterparts' for like the first ten hours. But then, after I managed to get a bit of time to look at everything with a level head and the sense to take it apart to see what was interesting to me, I thought about RK800-60 and the potential of letting him survive and just writing him as a character.

My characterization of him is not perfect. In fact, it's a little too sympathetic, but I'm glad people like him and are in fact cheering him on in the The World Was Wide Enough series. I'm going to try to break down how his character was pieced together.

I write for myself. It's very easy to see that in my writings. A lot of my writing is my coping mechanism. I use my works as catharsis. When I am in a situation that's tough to deal with, or a situation I have been through, I tend to get angry if I bottle it all up, because I often get in the mindset that it's unfair that I had to go through something, and it's unfair that the world doesn't care, which is dramatic, but is the best way I can put it. The most harmless way I can think of to deal with it is through writing (someone's going to suggest therapist, and well, mental health care here is super bad, it's taboo and it's hard to find a therapist here, and because they're hard to find, they are hella expensive. In one visit, I can buy probably like a hundred pieces of my iron supplements.), and the way I write, I usually put the character through the bad stuff, but always make them realize they can overcome it, and they do overcome it, sometimes through self-discovery, sometimes through pettiness, sometimes through the help of everyone around them, and it helps. 

Writing for oneself is very important because if you constantly write for an audience, you are going to end up miserable. The pressure is going to crush you. So that's an important lesson to learn here aside from the technical stuff. I wrote RK800-60 during a time when my depression was hitting hard again and I used him as a sort of stand-in for what I was going through, but he had his family to help him start to pull himself out of it.

Another thing that was important in writing RK800-60 was finding a base personality for him from what we could see in canon. And from canon, we can find that he is:

•  a cutthroat bastard. If one is playing full deviant route (which was what route TWWWE was following) he had Connor's memories and yet felt nothing for Hank and took him hostage. So he's very obedient, very good at following orders. (But if we go with this another way - the 'what if' way, we can also say perhaps he felt Connor's fear at being deactivated and that was the most prominent emotion, as he'd rationalized that his memories aren't really his memories, just copies of Connor's)
• dramatic. You want to tell me this guy hid in a row of androids with Hank just waiting for Connor to arrive so he could step out at the right time and he's not dramatic?
• bitch ass liar and good actor
• sadistic, but hey, I think Machine Connor is just sadistic in general, 
• smug. "Very moving, Connor."  this guy r e e k s of smugness
• already has the seed for deviancy. See above.

Actually, the more I write this, the more I realize how much RK800-60's personality actually shows in the game. But it's also not enough because we only see him in the context of the mission and taking down Connor. The World Was Wide Enough was written on two 'what-if' situations: a) what if androids got overwhelmed when given emotions, especially because they functioned for so long without them, having a lot dumped on them would probably make them confused; it would be reasonable to write androids who were overwhelmed with their new emotions and didn't know how to cope with them, and b) what if RK800-60 lived.

So we have an android who is very sure of himself and his identity and his emotions - and then all that is suddenly thrown to the side when Connor awakens him, and he has all this new feelings and can process input differently, and so his identity, his idea of who he is, is shaken. For a lot of people, something like that isn't very easy to deal with, especially when you've have little to no help. 

RK800-60 is smug, I read him as smug and self-assured, so even if he's confused, I always see him as the type to not say that anything is wrong, and that was his motivation in the beginning. Eventually, his confusion and depression wore that down a little (we see that in For Both You and Me, he agrees to watch movies with Hamilton and he makes a friend), but another factor that plays into this is Connor and everyone else not knowing how to approach him, and RK800-60 not knowing how to make friends. He's shown to be aloof, which I used because a) guilt - he has memories of being a deviant hunter and b) North doesn't trust him, and for good reason, and if the people of Jericho see that she doesn't trust him, then it follows that some of them will be wary of approaching him too, because North is one of the leaders of the settlement. And he's also got a lot on his mind because of he's constantly analyzing his own emotions. The rubik's cube as a fidget object was a little touch to show how antsy he would get sometimes.

So basically, RK800-60 characterization was his base personality (which we see in the game) + fic situation (what if androids got overwhelmed/what if he lived) + his reaction and fic factors (being confused and aloof / Connor's cluelessness on how to help him / everyone not being sure how to approach him). All that equals RK800-60 in TWWWE. In For Both You And Me, we have him with the Andersons, so we now use his personality from TWWWE + situations in FBYAM + his reactions. 

RK800-60 in TWWWE is definitely like a kid (or a...teenager or something) who's still trying to figure out who he is, especially because while Connor had days to adjust to his deviancy, he didn't. It was just dumped on him, and he just came from kidnapping his father-figure, or the father-figure of the Connor whose memories, at that time, he shared. And then he was spared and left with no guidance and no one who wanted to talk to him, so he's a mess.

RK900, I've only written for in Someday, Someday, and that's not done yet, but in SS, he's an unfinished prototype (so, while he's advanced - fight me, character concept designers of Detroit: Become Human, I pulled out my ideas from my cyberpunk original story to give them to RK900 because apparently you all think putting a forensics lab in an androids mouth is the peak of design - he's also incomplete; no voice box, faulty memory circuits, may or may not glitch out in the future), and since he is faster, stronger, etc., I gave him upgraded features (NANOTECH! NANOTECH! NANOTECH!) and had still have the 'I always accomplish my missions' thing that the Connors have. He tracked down the Andersons because they were in his memories (interfaced from RK800-60) and he needed to find his engineer. His seed for deviancy is in the fact that he doesn't want to die (from Connor, but interfaced from RK800-60).

He's slightly harder to write because we only get like ten seconds of him, but points I did take from the game is that he's an upgrade, so I'm writing him like an upgrade. That means better features (I'm gonna riot, I hate that their smartest idea was a forensics lab in an android's mouth) and as, if Cyberlife has already won, it's reasonable to assume their new detective android wouldn't be 'programmed for deviancy' (calling BS on that, by the way) and so would be more machine-like and objective, he's also a little more emotionless and a little harder to get to than the RK800s. But, because he's a prototype here, his program is also unfinished, which means ... yep, he can still go deviant, lmao. It's the same formula base personality (I just took Machine Connor) + what if situation (what if RK900 lived too, but given that the androids won, he reasonably wouldn't be a finished prototype) + his reactions = SS RK900. 

But, overall, writing fics is still writing one's interpretation of an iteration of a piece of media, so really, write what you want, and have fun writing it. Go wild. If it's your AU, then it's your rules. Fics are made for self-indulgence, and in the end, that's what they should be. Just look at A Lullaby for Gods. That's plenty self-indulgent from me.