Right, you asked me for a critique a whi
le ago. Well sorry for taking so long but I’ll get right to it, though first a brief word of apology. I find that my behaviour in your previous thread was a bit uncalled for, though not wholly undeserved. Disregarding the reasoning behind my verbal assault, I do have a bit of an attitude problem with you. As I said in Synthia’s thread, I tend to keep such things to myself since I don’t like making spiel for no reason, but they tend to build up over time and sometimes it just needs to get out before I can realize how unfounded some of it is. But yes, I do take issue in the general arrogance and nonchalance you approach many a situation with.
That’s besides the point though. I also take issue with the absolute zero effort you seem to put in your work, though that’s a more personal issue and I shouldn’t be taking that out on you, certainly not in an environment like this where it isn’t really required at all. I used to advocate for a certain sembleance of quality in the work people made here but then I realized people just come here to have fun and not have to take things so seriously, so I stopped my advocacy and just let people do whatever because honestly, who am I to tell people what to do. And the same goes for you, I should just let you do whatever. So yes, my apologies for my rather rude behaviour in the other thread, you took it like a champ by not lashing back out to me, and for that I’ll bring myself to bother writing this critique.
So one little remark I have right off the bat before we get to any of the characters, is more of a question. You making this here thread where you bring forth your character concepts to be criticized, and you specifically asking for my critique after my harsh words has me believing you’re serious about improving yourself, yet while reading through this char page I still feel as if zero forethought and revision went into any of it. I get that it’s a work in process but just cobbling things together from the top of your mind is the antithesis of improving oneself when it comes to writing. What I’m asking is, are you really serious about improving? If so, why don’t you at least try to put some more thought into these things? I can tell you wrote all of it in one sitting, and if you haven’t you sure as hell haven’t bothered to re-read any of what you wrote.
(how long did it take you to write this anyways?)
1st character ; The World Eater
This character is rubbish. Bin it because there’s no way to make him work. That’s all there is to say about it, but I’ll explain the hows and whys.
Let me just start by stating that if you have to specifically mention that your character may seem invincible, but isn’t, in his weaknesses, you’re doing something wrong. If you were to sit down to revise, such things should stick out like enormous red flags to you, and beckon you to do some rewriting and rethinking.
I don’t see why a character needs such an abundance of titles, honestly. Any title is meaningless unless it has specific implications to the story, and while you brandish around the title planet eater for your dude here there’s really no planet eating he’s done that warrants such a name. It ends up looking like some dumb attempt to make your character sound really cool and badass that falls flat on its face.
On that topic, when I hear the word planet eater I think about giant monstrosities or people with beyond overpowered world-devouring abilities. Since neither of those are particularly fit for a scene like the wRHG, “Planet eater” is a title that is, itself, a massive red flag for overpowered/overloaded character. The strongest characters we have, for example, are Zalgo, Omega and Handyman, but even they have been heavily tweaked so as to not obliterate the opposition in the blink of an eye. If your character is needlessly strong, you’ll see them put into situations where they’re incredibly underpowered by your opponents, leading to boring battles altogether.
His backstory is a cliché-ridden snoozefest that tries to be badass but fails.
“He was drafted into the imperial army at the young age of five” Honestly, I have to wonder what kind of dystopian reich this planet eater lives in that he gets recruited into the army when he’s still afraid of the dark. Is there any actual reason for him to be in the army from such a young age other than that you, the writer, wanted him to be? Does it enhance or enrich his story in any way? Even if it does, I doubt it is in a way that at all shapes a meaningful story. It’s dumb and pointless and is there for no other reason than that the author wanted it to be there, which is the worst kind of writing. It’s on par with winning a battle because a meteor crashlanded on your opponent right as he was about to kill you.
“ It was on his tenth birthday when he first went to war. He wiped out a whole army with one finger.”
Again, no point to this other than to make him look badass or overpowered. I honestly don’t get why this needs to be here at all. Maybe to you this makes him look very powerful and frightening, but it just makes your audience roll their eyes sarcastically, sigh in boredom or do something of equivalent measure because it doesn’t inspire in them such feelings of terror or fright for his might because it’s just dumb writing. He killed an entire army with one finger, tell me again why I should at all care about this guy ever going to battle?
“At the young age of fifteen Michael was a human weapon standing under the throne of the emperor.”
Oh look, another self insert teenager with the power to destroy the world. This reads like a really, really cringy anime you know. I’m trying to keep sentences where I just take the piss at you with no constructive value to a minimum but every line of this backstory just makes me want to take the piss at how cringy it is. And I don’t even like cringe humour so this is just a big waste of time for me. Again, is there AT ALL any reason for him to be this needlessly powerful in his backstory? Is it so that when you write battles against other people you can just ass-pull a victory at any point because this guy is so strong nobody could ever beat him anyways? I bet it’s that.
“Empire becomes corrupt
Michael destroys the empire
Empire gets replaced with the republic of Randar
Michael goes mad? with power
He gets angry and destroys a mountain range
The world comes after him and michael is defeated
Michael gets banished to a place where he won’t have the power to return
“
After all, who has ever heard about something referred to as an empire that isn’t evil? Honestly this just leads like a checklist of clichés and did I not know any better I’d think you were taking the piss at yourself.
Most of all, however, this backstory has such dissonance with who the character really is, it doesn’t fit this kind of character at all. It’s obvious you’re trying to go for some kind of mage here, but why the needlessly overcomplicated and cringey backstory? I’ll rewrite your backstory in a single sentence and it has all the meaning, implication and value of what you just wrote ;
“A powerful warlock from another world, Michael eventually got banished from his realm when he grew mad with power, and now finds himself in a strange new world without the means to get back to his own.”
Now what does this sentence not tell you that your backstory did? That he was enlisted at the age of five, destroyed an army with one finger at ten and was a living weapon at fifteen? I’m sure all your audience was dying to read those little details. They definitely add so much to the character and his rich backstory.
Besides, obscuring a character’s background is a good thing, not a bad thing. It allows you to sometimes let your audience pry into the specifics of his background when it comes to mention in a conversation, for example. He could, for example, at one point mention he used to work for an empire, though left their service when he discovered their corruption. And since this is new information for your audience, you’ll retain their interest as opposed to repeating yourself and making them read something they know already.
Moving on, abilities and weaknesses;
Now, I’m not going to delve too in depth here because that’d require a whole essay’s worth of critique and in all honesty, you’re not worth that much effort. I’m moreso doing this for myself anyways because I highly doubt you’re going to listen all that much to what I’m saying here. Call me cynical, but you’re giving me little reason to believe otherwise.
What it boils down to is that you have a lot of abilities. Way too many, even. If at any point I need to open more than three spoilers to read your abilities, you’re doing something wrong. You have so many abilities, you won’t know what to do with three quarters of them and never end up using them. They turn into literal storytelling magic at that point where you can just have them do whatever the battle demands them to and you have this character that is unbeatable because he has the solution to every problem in his pocket. And an unbeatable character is boring.
Magic itself is already tricky because of what I said ; It’s hard to define but it requires clear defining because otherwise it becomes storytelling magic too and that’s the kind of magic you want to avoid at all costs, unless you’re writing a parody or something akin to that. You want to have a character with a central theme, a fire mage or a water mage, not an everything mage. It ends up becoming convoluted and, as I said, you end up having more powers than you know what to do with and most of them won’t ever see the light of day.
“Magic thief : Michael can absorb magic from a target via physical interaction. This process doesn’t remove a mage's power all together but if it goes on for long periods of time then it can begin to impact the targets magical abilities.”
This is one of the titular “strengths that cover weaknesses”, completely useless abilities that are just there to provide an additional condition when fighting certain characters. There is an immense lack of mages in the wRHG roster and what you’re doing here is giving your guy a power that is useless against all other characters, but makes him conditionally stronger for no reason when fighting mages. It’s dumb and should either be expanded to encompass a much broader range so the ability has more prominence (for example, making him able to absorb the inherent abilities of other fighters, though one could make a point that such a power is strong enough to warrant its own character) , or removed altogether.
“Michael was trained to fight in hand to hand combat.”
Who hasn’t? At this rate, it doesn’t even have to be mentioned anymore unless it is a lack of hand to hand knowledge in the weakness section. Moving on.
“Michael may sound invincible but he isn’t.”
Refer to what I said way back. You having to write this line should tell you immediately that this character is overcomplicated and overpowered.
“He is used to have the power of a god but now that he is exiled he has to understand that he doesn’t have that power anymore. But the thrill of battle makes him forget this fact. So”
I’d just like to point out how oddly phrased this sentence is. The way you wrote this gave me the impression that his arrogance doesn’t apply when he’s fighting, even though you’re saying that he forgets he doesn’t have the power akin to a God anymore. A better way to have written this would be ;
“He is used to the power of a god, and the thrill of battle often makes him forget that is no longer the case”.
“Mages in his world never really focused on physical strength after basic training. So Michael can’t take that much damage.”
But he can use his magic to strengthen his body, so this weakness is completely irrelevant.
“Michael is also from a different world. This means his body isn’t immune to the diseases here. So he will get sick easily.”
Nonsensical weakness. Okay, he may fall sick easily but how does this matter in a battle? It’s not like he’s gonna contract spontaneous diarrhea while fighting Sherlock Holmes to the death with an oversized pipe and shit himself so hard he dies on the spot. This is moreso something that should have prominence in non-battle story, where him being a foreigner to this world becomes more apparent. There is no wRHG fighter that makes you sick with their abilities, so this weakness makes no god damn sense.
“Michael isn’t trained to use any type of weapon.”
He’s a fucking mage. He doesn’t need them. Why is this a weakness?
“He also has no idea how to use technology or what it does.”
Same story. Well not really, one could say that he doesn’t understand that a gun fires a bullet. Still, he’s a mage so it doesn’t really matter to him all that much, don’t you think? If some RHG character points their strange dildo-shaped laser cannon at me I wouldn’t have a clue what it did until he fired it either.
Personality now.
First thing I notice is that you admit that you suck at these. This brings me to something I’d been meaning to bring up a long time now, and that is the issue of ambition versus overconfidence in one’s own ability. I’ll be going off topic for a second here, we’ll be back to your character in a bit.
So, I needn’t tell you that you aren’t exactly the best writer around. If anything you stating that you “suck at these” is proof that you’re aware of this yourself to a certain extent. Yet, you try to do these really elaborate characters with tonnes of powers and backstory and shit instead of just going for something simple to begin with. There is NOTHING wrong with humility and simplicity, Piston.
On the other hand, there is nothing wrong with ambition either, the wanting to challenge yourself with projects you know are just slightly bigger than you can handle. But there’s a difference between ambition and overconfidence. Surely, you know of the Icarus mythos?
Icarus and his father were stuck in a prison, but his father crafted two sets of wings made of wax and they used them to escape. Yet Icarus grew overconfident in that moment and flew too close to the sun, then his wings melted and he crashed down into the sea and died like the retard he was.
What I’m trying to say here is, don’t be an Icarus. Try to go for smaller, simpler characters first, and as you improve, start to elaborate, start to expand. This whole character, this “planet eater”, is you flying too close to the sun and plummeting to your own retarded death because you reached too high, tried to do too many things in a single character, and none of it works anymore because you’re simply not experienced enough to make it work.
Back to character; personality wise, he’s a complete brick made of turd. His only defining trait, as you put it, is that he doesn’t hesitate to kill, which reminds me of the infamous “nothing personnel, kid” (if you don’t get this reference, in a place like this, then you seriously need to brush up on your internets bubzie). Seriously, this is a boring character in every sense of the word.
Appearance I’m not one to judge most of the time except for stuff that’s clearly just put in there to make them look edgy or “badass”. In this case, let’s run down the wash list shall we?
-Has a trench coat; Check
-Has abnormal eye colour; Check
-Has white hair; Apparently not, good on you.
-Has scars for no reason other than to look cool; Check
-Wears sixteen belts; No
-Covers his face/eyes; No
-Measurements are in retarded instead of metric; You fucking bet your ass they are.
Right okay, enough of me having fun taking the piss at you again. Basically, if stuff is there only to make him look cool; Don’t. Just remove it, go for a more organic look. It’s good to have certain traits that define them, and scars can be there if they actually have a meaningful relation to the story or make sense for the character (though this has been clichéd so hard that you’d have to be a fucking master author to do something fresh with it, so far I’ve yet to see it in a non-cliché/edgy manner. Basically, a rugged veteran of battle can have scars but you mustn’t ma
