Hewitt ill join. plus I need to take my new fighter out for a test drive and to get my old rusty writing skills oiled.

I'm getting into this shindig.
Hewitt, add me if this works.

Requesting the attention of: PitchEnder, Thechosengamer, Phebeastickz, Chaotic Penguin, Ipman...and Veir.

Eh, count me in. ^^

Oh. Yeah sure, I'm in.

We're allowed to talk about wRHG right? Why is having a character who's a lab experiment so popular?

This is called the wRHG Discussion thread for a reason.

I'm not sure about why it is popular but its just a trend. Most likely set up by one member and picked up by the rest. There was one trend too back then when one of the writers made a half demon and every other new writer would pop in with his own rendition of the half demon.

Its a trend that will die down at some point. Its nothing new.

Quote from Urako

Why is having a character who's a lab experiment so popular?

Because its a really nice and easy lazy way to establish so many things:

- your character is very emo and therefore alot more interesting than normal people

- you never had any parents so no need to establish them, your childhood, and your past.

- Don't know how to explain your powers? Easy: Just say it was a lab experiment. Take your pick: Test subject gone wrong, escaped with the Only Prototype, have Prototype fused to character's body, Test Subject was infused or injected with something, test subject was bred to fight since childhood, test subject is a clone of an original badass, test subject 'escaped' but not really omg conspiracy

Am I hitting all the nodes here?

- that you live to fight or are a living weapon. Gets personality out of the way with just a little enough to establish how badass you are.

Quote from Hewitt

- your character is very emo and therefore alot more interesting than normal people

I think it could have just ended here. It's the same deal with half-demons. Sometimes it would hardly fit the character and someone would be like "and they're half a demon" and it just kinda seemed tacked-on for no reason. Said demon form also always doubled power and always the last resort that always happened every battle.

People kinda have this idea of what is cool. I mean think about how many characters are experiments in stories. Some easy examples are Deadpool, Hulk, and Wolverine. Then you have anime like Elfen Lied where half the characters are experiments of one sort or the other. It's latched on as this cool and edgy idea. So people hop onto it regardless of how much better the character could be made.

Oh and your character gets emo dialog like, "you don't understand what I've been through."

And with the amount of experiments around, you get drama like this:

"I do understand, ," he said.

The trend of lab experiments is probably more about following what's worked for other people instead of any other convenience. That's what happened with half-demons x years ago, which is, y'know. Not the best.

...said the person with a half-demon character.

The problem isn't that a lot of people are making lab experiments or half demons or magical elemental power knights with some sort of rage/super mode. It's that people are cribbing off of that and nothing else. It's like when Watchmen came out and was wildly amazing and critically acclaimed and afterwards superhero comics tried to copy their success by being darker and edgier without understanding that the darker and edgier bit was only a part of what made it successful, along with a well-written plot and characters, political commentary, and deconstruction of the superhero genre as a whole. As it turns out, making a good character/plot/backstory is difficult.

I mean, Jasper is half demon, but that's not the whole of his character. The main things that make him him is his general apathy towards and inability to understand human motivation as well as his entirely selfish desire to survive at any cost, which derive from his half-demonness, but are more than "he has demonic powers". He's certainly not the deepest character, but he's defined by who he is and what he believes in the present, not what he's physically capable of or what's happened in his past, which I think is where a lot of people misstep.

When it comes to lab experiments, there's a whole palette of flavors, so it's certainly possible to have variety within the category. (Though I do have to wonder where all of these evil scientist labs are getting their funding and resources, because science is monumentally expensive.) It's just that people usually go to "lab experiment" and stop there, and after a while, all of the lab experiments start to blend together.

Also there's the extremely soft Hollywood science that tends to go hand-in-hand with laboratory experiments which I have personal qualms about, but that's a different topic altogether.

Paging WafflesMgee...err...RichardLongflop

Quote from roBEAT

I didn't count but I imagine a ranking of themes of current characters like this:

1. Orphan (You don't see it at first sight but i think its in like at least one of three character stories)
2. Lab experiment
3. Serial killer
4. Some kind of monster

And then there are few humans who aren't 1, 2 or 3 but I think they aren't many.

edit: and demons of course. How did I forget the demons?

Then there's wayyyy at the bottom who are just skilled people.

Quote from Caelo

Then there's wayyyy at the bottom who are just skilled people.

Don't forget: random normal folks who gained powers from outta nowhere.