July 16, 2011
Dee and Vriska
I am doing my damnedest to edit my manuscript and get it in a working state. All the work I’m totally is totally helping, too: it’s been really useful. Things are improving. Man, if I did this kind of work every day, who knows what kind of poetry I’d be making! Maybe once everything settles down a bit I can try to set a schedule for myself that has some dedicated poem time.
The edits are taking awhile, though, because having gotten the thing out to a slightly larger group of people I trust, Dee’s character just wasn’t showing through. Of course, as the writer, I know exactly who Dee is. She’s a hardcore dominant who doesn’t believe in actual romance, but finds herself in one anyway. Okay, that’s really narrowing her down, but still. I get her. I love her. You have to love your characters.
However, Dee is a real bitch, to be quite honest. She’s selfish and violent. She treats Steven like shit while talking herself up. Steven is alright with it, but nobody could see the person behind Dee. Her motivations were not inherent in her actions. My poems from her perspective weren’t revealing her human qualities. You knew she was an evil bitch: that was clear from the Steven half of the book. I didn’t need to emphasize that. I needed to emphasize what makes her tick as a person.
I think I owe a lot to how I’m editing things now to Vriska from Homestuck. Vriska is a bluh bluh huge bitch, to use the Homestuck meme. She’s just a flat out terrible person, who screws over perspective friends just to prove her dominance, and does things like try to screw over all the living trolls just so she can have the honor of being the one to kill Bec Noir. If I met her in person, I would hate her, a lot, for not being a team player and for being so insanely selfish.
As a character, I love her to death.
Hussie has been smart enough to let us see a lot of the doubt and unsteadiness that comes from adopting a persona that’s so in-your-face my-way-is-always-right. Vriska doubts. She worries. She makes huge decisions on whims, such as helping John just to spite Terezi. Basically, she’s not an evil overlord bent on world destruction who makes mistakes because otherwise, how would the heroes win? She’s a terrible person who makes terrible mistakes by using her power so liberally. She’s nobody you’d want to be friends with, but she’s real.
Dee was lacking that, and as I go through, remove a lot of the super-cryptic language that I was using for her, and focus more on her desires and motivations, her character is becoming more clear. Having analyzed Homestuck to death, I could see where I was making some mistakes with a character I loved in sharing her with the world. Of course, I didn’t apply this immediately. It was mostly subconscious. But I was driving home, listening to Killed By BR8K Spider!!!!!!!! and it all kind of clicked for me. It was exactly what I was doing! It’s working out well.