Or rather, does your character? When I wrote the story for Felicia in the Treasure Box, I had a style in mind of how she moves, how she fights. I tend to describe these things during missions if we are doing well enough I can pause to type. I was talking with Kelli about "how I see" Felicia being and wanted to start a conversation on how people "visualize" their characters moving.
For instance, I see Felicia fighting like this (well getting closer to this). There is a grace to the movements and the way she flows from one manuever to the next.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zw0jzGuvo4M
And this is what I see her superspeed being like and tried to describe in what I mean when she says "I RUN"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_V1EkYmoJo
So the question is, how do you visualize your characters? (If possible)
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5 comments:
Kelli -
Kelli's whole gimmick is that since she was a doll turned to life, she looks more perfect than people should...which some might find eerie. It'd be a lot like living around a CGI lolita. Her voice is modeled after Joey Lauren Adams (Mallrats, Chasing Amy), and her every pose, every movement, every facial tick is either cute, sexy, or somewhere between. She doesn't know how -not- to be alluring. She's jailbait fantasy turned to flesh.
When fighting, she swings with super human strength and quickness, but looks more like a child playing than anything else. She hits people in the skulls and bones with wild shots, never quite taking aim and with no real skill behind it whatsoever. If she tried really hard, she could put up a good fight against someone well trained, but for the most part is just a powerhouse run amock. With a wrench.
Charisma -
The opposite of Kelli, Charisma is a good-ish looking 27 year old woman who's body is obviously very well looked after. Her movements are confident, cool, reserved. Every look is the look of a predator, albiet somewhat hidden. Every word is chosen carefully, but flows naturally. There's always something intangible just past what she's saying or doing, another layer that's just right outside the realm of the obvious. She tends to slink rather than walk, and looks like she's on the hunt most of the time.
In combat, she blends several forms of martial arts into her weapons combat, going for quick, paralyzing shots rather than kills. She tries to leave her victims relatively unharmed, and unless they do something really stupid, that's how they are: put down and out of the fight, but little to no permanent damage. Unless I RP it otherwise OR the mission inherently calls for a death, absolutely none of her victims ever sustain a mortal wound.
Not sure if that's what you were looking for, but it's the image I get in my head for them!
purrrfect. Just really want to get an idea of how everyone visualizes the way their characters are. I think it adds something since not everyone can type 50+ WPM in combat.
It's hard to describe how Thessa moves. Being so used to moving through water, she tends to move very swiftly, but if anyone actaully watches her, it seems like she is always waiting for some sort of resistance to her movements. That is because water has a lot more weight to it then air.
That is also how I explain her Super Speed. She isn't the flash, but because she is so used to working against something to move, she breezes being on land. Mind you, she doesn't actaully "run" but more like swim with her whole body, which involves running, crawling, bouncing off of walls, and even slithering.
So... How does Thessa move? Watch a shark swim, now add legs and put it on land... there you go.
Alistaire:
Imagine an actress saying the following...
(Michelle Rodriguez)
"Imagine me saying the following..."
She moves with fluid grace, stylish, poised, her twin Sig-Sauers extended in a passion play as choreographed by John Woo. A mix of anime gunkata and Hollywood flash, kiss kiss BANG! BANG! she is simultaneously a contemporary dancer and a thug. She is as a CGI fantasy, something dreamed up by Rockstar, their East LA interpretation of Lara Croft, never deigning to pull down her shades to gaze upon the blood spatter from her ever-present handguns. One shot? Fuck no. Make sure he's dead, a double-tap to the temple and on to the next.
And of course, the thugs... Central Casting's good at coming up with them... semi-metrosexual gabachos with a barely-restrained brutishness under the veneer of club civility. Slightly more than hip-hop, but far short of South Beach, they fight and die for her... because she's their homegirl, at once silver-spoon centerfold fantasy and cold bitchy puts-out-for-anybody badgrrl PUNK.
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Professor Dia
"... I don't know about this, darling, I don't really need to fight much, I prefer to let them fight FOR me... oh very well..."
She moves with all the grace and sleaze of a pole-dancer, smoke clinging to her form, or is it tar? the flames of her passion burning around her, to be launched at the gathered throng like molotovs at a riot. Her gaze is incendiary, causing foe and friend alike to feel sudden heat of their own, all-consuming, passionate, "GOD I want to fuck her!" fantasies blotting out all rational thought. Friends turn on friends with shouts of "I saw her first!" and angry brutish blows, unthinking, random, JEALOUS. Or they stand there, slack jawed, absentmindedly masturbating themselves as they tumble headlong into what they wish would be happening... or what they fear. And one by one... they fall... enscorcelled by Lust and then burned by it.
"I'm just ... too hot for you to handle, darlings."
(apologies to the Art of Noise)
((Wow, I almost missed this thread. That would've sucked!))
Ivy-
With Ivy, I was originally shooting for a 'radioactive girl going slowly nuts' feel, but, I dropped that in favor of a more enthusiastic, more relatable 'career henchwoman' feel. I try to reflect that in her attitude and her outlook; now that she knows she was a fluke to begin with, with no actual history to speak of, she's much more willing to 'pull for the team', and tries her best to be good support, rather than taking the lead. She works like a sponge, soaking up the groove of the people around her, and spindling and mutating it before kicking it back out with a fine green glow on it. She's not 'happy', she's manic. She's not 'sad', she's morose. She doesn't angry, she gets ballistic and erratic. Everything's 'too much', which I thought fit in nicely with the fact that she's putting off enough excess radiation to power a shopping mall.
Physically, Ivy's still got her clone-source's body; a lifetime of career gymnastics has left her thin and taut as a suspension-bridge guywire, with a tomboyish feel to her gestures and a bad habit of forgetting her femininity in favor of relaxing. Her movements are springy, overamped and a little off-center, as if her bones and cartiledge were made of stiff rubber. Her balance is flawless - she could go on-point on the tip of a broom-handle, if the situation called for it - but she doesn't show it, preferring instead to keep moving constantly, twitching, rocking, dancing slightly or hopping in place. If she could keep still for more than five consecutive seconds, it would be a miracle.
I'd originally based her personality off of Alyson Hannigan's role in "American Pie" ("...and this one time, at the cloning facility..."), and it's served me fairly well for keeping an image of her pacing in mind. She's energetic to a fault, partially due to the fact that she's more-or-less a living reactor core, and that comes across in everything she does. She's a constant talker with limited social skills; she loathes 'dead air' and awkward silence (and it's -all- awkward to Ivy), and will go out of her way to fill it with conversation, random asides, or onomatopeia ("Zomg. Boom."). For the record, it's hard to express in text, but her accent is supposed to emulate a cross between Bridge-and-Tunnel-Jersey-Girl and Rhode Island, with a hint of perma-stress to it. Too much coffee, too little sleep.
Doctor Greta Tod-
In contrast to Ivy, who I consider fairly vanilla, Greta's my 'out-there' character. I've always had a quiet, embarassing attraction to the pulp-era 'Nazi Dominatrix' archetype, but, I can't work in stereotypes and cliches without modifying them slightly, so, I tweaked the concept with in-game information, and In Absentia was the result.
Greta's movements are all thought out sixteen minutes in advance. Her facial features are smooth and plasticine, and her expression rarely - and I mean rarely - changes from a sort of passionless, disinterested blankness, save in the most subtle and remote of ways. Her right eyebrow seems to hike up without her consent, a telltale sign that something's caught her attention, and her voice is a vaguely Saxony-Germanic murmur, crisp and clean but usually an octave below comfortable hearing level. She moves with robotic grace, almost disquietingly so, giving her a faintly artificial feel. Her posture is rebar-perfect, and the only 'excess' movements she indulges in are tinkering with the plasteel screw-sockets on the edges of her wrist or drumming her fingertips together in slow, methodical patterns. One element I try to convey more than anything is how unnatural emotion seems on her. There's a line from an Edward Gorey piece that springs to mind for me: "Her smile made beetles swoon, her frown/made geese and cows turn upside-down." It's odd, but, that's the sensation I'm going for; if Greta's smiling, something's gone very wrong for someone, or something has broken her bulletproof shell of 5th Column conditioning to allow her a moment of humanity. If something manages to push her into a rage, she burns like nitrogen fire, highly dangerous but deceptively calm. The conditioning program she's undergone has 'dialed down' her emotional levels, so, even a powerful emotion comes through as subdued.
Something I should elaborate more on is how Greta's 'Hide' power works. Unlike Felicia or Kelli, Greta doesn't so much move from shadow to shadow; really, she stands in plain sight almost all the time. The trick lies in the explanation behind the power, her Anonymity Serum. The concept I had was a chemical that makes the user capable of emitting a pheremone that makes them incredibly easy to overlook; people see her, they just don't acknowledge her. If somebody's watching intently and she activates the power, she seems to fold up like origami, collapsing into thin air. I'd imagine, the longer someone spends with her, the easier it is to see through the serum (no matter how powerful anonymity is, once you know someone, really know them, you're not going to overlook their presence), but, she also has a counteragent for quick identification, applied via eyedropper. When she speaks under the serum's influence, her voice is kind of a 'just out of eyesight' echo, as if she's speaking from slightly outside someone's peripheral vision.
I try to play up Greta as a vaguely-sexualized version of a 'Mengele' style scientist; the experiment is job-one, everything else is an acceptable sidenote, but pales in comparison to the task at hand. She doesn't harbor animosity to any one particular race, creed or people, so much as displaying general contempt to anybody and anything not 'on her side', and views the majority of the human race as potential lab-rats. Greta loves her work, and it shows in her laboratory more than anywhere else; in her lab, her defenses are down, and her conditioning fades, weakened by her intense, obsessive adoration for her experiments and patients. Even when torturing a randomly-acquired victim, Greta seems deeply enthralled with the person in question, almost like a career archeologist meeting somebody who managed to get a glimpse of the Holy Grail. Her real 'Wrath' comes through here, as she gleefully and brutally shifts between almost erotic affection and unspeakably inhuman violence, all the while delighting to each individual cut and laceration as if it were her first time. In the field, she pushes the boundaries of the term 'sadist'. Especially evidenced in her Assassin's Strike, Greta executes clean, sharp assaults without remorse, purposefully inflicting maximum damage and pain with minimum effort. She has a habit of intoning Maria Sharapova-style 'lung grunts' when she attacks, giving her entire battlefield experience a disturbingly sensual feel. You know, if you can get over the fact that she just shoved her hand elbow-deep into someone's stomach and speared their aorta.
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