As usual, I responded better to someone else's challenge than my own, so let's see how well I do with my own challenge in the coming week, aye? Once again this was a pretty good week of characterization for me. As a general rule, the boys in Sector Five follow a pretty similar mold - they all have tragic pasts, and they're all inhuman killers now with a soft spot for their commander. It can run a little boring, right? I remembered that the best characters have flaws, and real ones. So this week I decided to explore what makes each of the boys more human than he'd like, and I did my best to tie it into their existing characters.
For example, Tobias can look like anyone he wants with the nature of his gift, but he's still scarred from the horror of both of his lives, being the quintessential high school loser on acid, and despite being a trained killer he still hates himself. Both of Gabriel's lives were rife with the horrors of racism, and it's difficult for him to pretend to be racist to get the job done. Keith's second life was set during The Troubles in Ireland, so he hates the British, and as far as he's concerned Angel, the James Bond figure, stands for all the worst of Britain, and Keith struggles with that. Angel is womanizer and has some very deeply entrenched notions of his own sexuality, and he can't let those go. Christian struggles with class issues, having swung from one end of the spectrum to the other between lives. What I liked about Christian was that I could develop his coming to grips with his sense of self by the time the rest of the boys show up. Christian has several decades' seniority over the others, and I don't know that I really ever explored that properly before.
Knowing what a character struggles with and showing a character facing a struggle - one that's deep-set in a personality or history - makes a character interesting, and I'm glad I'm learning more and more about what makes my boys tick.
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