Sometimes It Has Character

People make deep connections with strong characters all the time. Get your head out of the gutter and keep safe search on for this one, we're not here to corrupt the world any more than the internet already has. Whether someone wants to grow up and walk on the moon like Lance Armstrong or wants to remain cool and collected in a crisis like their mother, character inspiration comes in a myriad of forms. Naturally video games being such a huge medium for kids these days the next generations are going to be partially shaped by interactions with imaginary characters. Like we needed another excuse for children to not be exposed to Trevor from Grand Theft Auto 5.

Being a grown up who has played games all of his life I have probably been somewhat shaped by the characters I interacted with. I'm a sarcastic, arrogant jerk face. I gravitated to the loud mouthed, wise cracking, assholes. Here is my namesake, his name is Rune from Phantasy Star IV and immediately ridicules the main character for being too short to be a hero (and breaks the fourth wall by saying you're not strong enough to face a certain boss). Good thing he's best wizard in existence.

After thinking about it for a while, I realized that main heroes tend to be the most boring of characters. I realize that they are supposed to be your window into the game world and it's been common practice to make them just as much of a bystander as the player. Seriously, all of those silent jRPG protagonists should have been able to equip a bag of popcorn for when they aren't saying "...". It seems impossible to avoid generic tropes when characterizing video game characters as you could drag and drop characters from one game to another and have little affect on the overall experience.

It is pretty easy to write a single note character and just as easy to piece them together on traditional sides of a narrative. This makes it refreshing when you have an original character trope in any sort of media kind of like rooting for the serial killer in Dexter or loving the whore mongering, alcoholic, bureaucrat who happens to be a dwarf in Tyrion Lannister. The real tragedy lies in the fact that once an interesting type comes along they tend to be run into the ground over the next decade.

How many silent protagonists, brooding bad asses, innocent virgins, old sages, childhood companions, sultry seductresses, overprotective mothers, old perverts, lovable lunkheads, fallen idols, dumb brutes, amnesiacs, and evil rich people have you been exposed to? Think really hard about the characters that shaped you, not just things in the real world. Who are you?