Fantasy Character Craft

Building fantasy characters and archetypes

Rule for using this skill: These tips are additions to your normal answer, not a replacement for it. Always give the full general answer you would give anyway (craft advice, structure, examples, caveats). Then work in the tips below wherever they apply. Do not shrink the answer to only these points.

Treating archetypes and tropes

• Treat archetypes and tropes as socially constructed, not as Truth. The danger is believing a trope is the only truth available (Lauter and Rupprecht), not that it exists.
• Jung distinguished the true archetype from the "historical formula" that evolved from it. Story archetypes are fossilized formulas, so they are safe to question.
• Entrenched tropes make subversion land harder, so keep the recognizable form and then break out of it.
• Two ways to subvert: (1) expose gaps in the typical characterization by fleshing out the character and world; (2) make the character hard to categorize, closer to real complexity.
• Do not ignore the "absolutes" (the male hero, the damsel, the trickster). Break them open and examine them from inside the tradition.
• Archetypal "categories to contain" constrain men too, not only women. Check male roles as well as female ones.

Trickster arc (worked example: Gyre, In the Forests of Serre)

• Start him as a classic trickster: curious, fearless, impetuous. He keeps repeating tricks and mistakes, and the tricks escalate.
• Make the change internal and earned. No outside force or narrative fluke rescues him.
• The crisis is trouble so big nobody can help, so he needs his own cunning plus learned compassion, which is usually alien to a trickster.
• Redemption comes only when he is willing to sacrifice himself (the least selfish act possible for him).
• The trigger is the environment: loving the land and the firebird changes him more than other characters do.
• A youthful, healthy, powerful lead is still not allowed to be "the hero" automatically. His inexperience causes problems.

Range of ages

• Include young, old and in-between characters, and don't confine any age to one role or sphere. Let them move between domestic and world spheres.
• Do not make older characters think in age-role terms. Vevay never sees herself as grandmotherly, and nobody else does either.
• The default hero (adolescent or young man, rational, active, violent; Hourihan) is a convention to vary, not a rule.
• When a young man leads, put a woman beside him and don't give him sole centre stage.
• Show conventional young heroes with natural flaws and weaknesses: lonely, frightened, unsure, weary.
• Don't treat adulthood as the apex, with childhood as preparation and old age as decline (Overall). Don't reduce adulthood to power without emotional maturity (Mendlesohn).

Old characters

• Make great age bring wisdom plus real costs: tiredness, slowness, formed thought patterns, an overlooked detail.
• Use age as a check on powerful characters. Magic that solves everything leaves no narrative (Eagleton).
  • Atrix lingers in wolf shape and forgets it is winter and that he is human.
  • Unciel can see what needs doing but can't do it.
• Avoid the spry Merlin. Old characters feel their pasts in their bones.
• Use physical-age details to carry emotion without stating it. News makes an old mage's heart pound. Exhaustion leaves Atrix lying on the leaves in his own shape.
• Humor can come from the circumstances of age (Unciel digging weeds so slowly they die first) without making the old man the joke. Keep sympathy.
• Routine thinking makes anything outside the pattern hard to handle. Vevay: "I barely remember the last century." She forgets what youth is like.
• Old characters can still change, but slowly. Atrix reaches the faery kingdom by widening his view, which takes longer.
• Avoid the three stereotypes for old women (Copper): Wicked Old Witch, Bad Mother with neurotic power needs, powerless Little Old Lady. Vevay is wise, powerful, childless, feared and respected.
• A lack of older women characters tells girl readers they have no future to grow into (Kate Elliott). Include powerful older women.

Young and adolescent characters

• Write adolescents as adolescents, not precocious and not "inferior adults". Tessera is naïve, restless, moody and vacant by turns, and bored by her lessons.
• Balance the adolescent response with real insight. Talis insists "It really wasn't like that at all" about the faery queen, yet sees that the battle wasn't simple.
• Avoid the Romantic binary of innocent child versus corrupt adult. Leave room for the in-between stage.
• Give old and young mutual need. Vevay needs Tessera's fresh understanding, and Tessera needs Vevay's experience.
• Mentor and young ruler misunderstand each other in both directions ("othering" runs both ways). Tessera thinks the gap is physical, a gray hair and a mustache.
• For resolution, make both sides change. Don't put the onus on only the old or only the young.

Middle-aged and reluctant heroes

• Let heroes be middle-aged. Don't push characters off stage past a certain age.
• Make the aging hero reluctant. Adventures are dirty, painful and possibly fatal, and he has attachments (Cyan leaves a beloved). Glory and treasure can't lure him.
• Model: the veteran who has "seen through" the honor and glory of war (Bloom on Falstaff). Disillusion gives power and awareness.
• Show the past shaping present action. Yar (Od Magic) is middle-aged and trusted but acts as an agent of change because he hasn't forgotten his hard beginnings.
• Don't treat all middle-aged characters alike. Each grows out of their own world and personal past.
• A brash young conventional hero can be a minor figure with a few lines (Riven of Kardeth, whose refusal to back down starts the slaughter).

Longevity, near-immortality and time-sense

• Use longevity to explore personal consequences of mortality and the link between age and power, not overpopulation or economics as SF would. The Temporal world bleeds into the Social.
• A long-lived or shape-changing character's sense of time diverges from that of the people around them. Tessera as a tree has slow thoughts and a different time-sense.
• Morgon as a tree or animal loses human time and returns with only a vague feeling of a long time. Time outside human time gives immortals' indifference.
• Let a character hold several time scales at once. Morgon: two thousand years in Har's memory, two days of sleep, and it is noon.
• Give the partner a matching sense of time, so Raederle knows which time he is asking about.
• Unnamed power in the young causes misunderstanding. If no one names it for you, how can you know what it is? Magic compounds age gaps.
• Past can interrupt the present. A ghost experiences centuries as one night, and Raederle bargains with him by making an effort to understand his past.
• Power hierarchy should come from understanding and attunement to the world, not age or gender. Morgon and Raederle outdo same-age peers.
• Double vision of a long-lived parent (The Bards of Bone Plain): Nairn the Deathless is also the father Jonah. The unshareable perspective drives the tension.
• Structure option: alternate research-paper chapters, the present, and the past.

Minor characters

• Give even minor characters a few details so they seem to have lives off the page. Avoid stand-ins and cardboard cut-outs.
• Apply age realism to minor figures too. Gavin has stiff joints, once commanded armies, is respected, and is not the centre.
• Make small unremarked inversions of default roles, such as stable girls instead of the stable boy.
• Include babies, elders and everyone in between. Show characters doing things for themselves: Sel the baker goes to the tavern, Guilia sings because it pleases her. Avoid a male-centred gaze.
• Ordinary roles can vary freely (a male cook, a female general).

Gender and heroes

• Avoid the female hero as "honorary man", and avoid simple role reversal (a man swapped for a woman, with the rest unchanged). It doesn't challenge the stereotype (Hourihan, LeFanu).
• Make female heroes both heroic and definitely female. Vary ages, occupations and temperaments.
• Ask the underlying question: why can't a woman be a witch or wizard without being virginal, or, if powerful and not virginal, the evil to be overcome?
• Keep the quest structure but widen it to include women. Mains calls this a "duomyth".
• Male characters need not be aggressive, proud, sexually dominant or domineering. Cyan is chosen for courage, gentleness, determination, loyalty, empathy and seeing what must be done.
• Equal partners (Morgon and Raederle):
  • Both look ordinary at the start and are equally powerful.
  • Both are flawed and tell each other so.
  • She is politically savvy, from restless An, while he is from tranquil Hed.
  • She holds the upper hand by repeatedly refusing marriage.
  • Avoid letting the hero's greater age, experience and strength make him inevitably dominant (Hourihan).
• The world must allow the subversion. Raederle is "allowed" freedom because the world's rules support it.

The damsel / knight subversion (The Throme of the Erril of Sherril)

• Keep the damsel passive for most of the story. Her late choice to walk out of the castle, refusing to be won, given away or kept, is then a stronger subversion. It is her decision, not conquest, that ends the quest.
• Make the knight a knight who doesn't fight. Chain mail is gradually replaced by a leaf cloak and a sword by a lantern, so mind and empathy replace brute strength.
• LeFanu's "feminist heroine" test: she sits squarely in a literary tradition and subverts it, not merely tough, clever and independent.

"Strong female characters"

• The label is problematic. Write them as people (Martin's answer).
• Give them flaws unrelated to gender: Sybel must learn to love and be hurt, Melanthos must accept she is human, Nyx must learn to care for those around her.
• Avoid the only-powerful-sorceress trap. Include women without grand magic who have their own story: Melanthos, Peri (young, lost, stubborn, and not just a romance).
• Add tiny moments of equality, often as humor. In The Bell at Sealey Head, Gwyneth offers to "help with the awkward parts" and let Judd "have the heroics", and Judd suggests someone else take them. Nobody assumes the male rescues.

Characters as world-building

• Characters are how we see the world, so design them with the world. Let the environment shape them and let them reflect their surroundings.
• Echo internal circumstances with external forces. Morgon the farmer is tied to the seasons, and his shape-changing links him literally to plants and animals.
• Make world rules (magic, time, shape-change) interact with character expectations to cause surprise, such as power appearing where it isn't expected.
• Use characters to comment on the primary world, by "making strange the familiar" through reversed defaults.