"Real" Characters

[serria]

Are any of your characters inspired by real people? Or is everyone (to the best of your knowledge!) made from scratch?

Comments

[sarillia]

I have only ever done this accidentally. I once made an offhand mention of the main character's brother only because I needed her to receive a letter and I thought there should be more than one delivered to her so I had another one be from her brother "probably asking for money again". He later showed up along with his wife and they turned into caricatures of my brother and his girlfriend. I swear I didn't do it on purpose. It was still funny though.

There are other times when I realize that one of my characters is reminding me of someone so I might draw on that person's quirks to make the character seem more real. I think I'm not alone in sometimes having trouble thinking of idiosyncratic speech patterns and gestures and things for each character.

Mostly my characters are cobbled together from all different sources; general traits, pieces of other fictional characters, bits of real people, some of my own experiences, etc.

[inkdust]

None of my characters has ever been consciously inspired by a real person, but I know the influences are there. If I notice that one reminds me of someone I know or another fictional character, I'll probably make an effort to give them more clearly different qualities alongside the similarities because I absolutely do not want those associations. More likely I'll notice a similar type of character rather than concrete similarities. That's okay with me, because if our brains are going to categorize people and characters into types, there can only be so many types out there.

[agilebrit]

I freely mine my friends for character names, but the characters themselves are (mostly) drawn from my imagination. A couple of notable exceptions are my Mad Scientist, who was inspired by Tony Stark (and it shows--minus the Asshole Gene). My werewolf private eye was inspired by Harry Lockhart from "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," although the only similarity he now bears to him is that he's a PI, he calls the women in his life "honey," and RDJ plays him in my head.

[ayumidah]

People I don't like make good antagonists sometimes ;)

But, nah. I generally try not to do that, haha.

[splinteredstar]

Honestly, it's more likely for me to draw on other fictional characters. I don't always notice it's happening at the time, but sometimes I'll look back and notice it. Usually it's just traits - Eira holds herself the way AC!Cloud does, and is even worse at dealing with her emotions; Estair is basically a less malicious Count D; Ice and Li were originally in a KH fanfiction that went so AU that I decided that I may as well just go whole hog and make it original. I think when I was in high school I had a universe where I took all the characters I thought hadn't been done justice in their original universes and shoved them into gang warfare with each other.

Of course, all of these characters have gone in ways that the original has not, and developed into unique characters. I don't know if that's better or worse than basing them off of real people. But 'made from scratch' is probably a misinterpretation.

Inspiration is a lot like compost, I think. You get interesting things out by having poured interesting things in.

[caecilia]

Lately, yes. Mostly because I've been thinking about the past a lot recently and wondering whatever happened to so-and-so, and those thoughts evolve into stories. Although I noticed that one character who was based quite blatantly on a girl I went to school with also became part me and part my mom.