Hi! I know you may not seen this and make not answer, but I am a major softmod fan and would like to know how you wrote for Ben, if you did. How did he portray himself in your mind? What is his general personality, quirks, mannerisms that you might of thought of whilst writing him? And most importantly, what would you suggest for someone who wants to write his character accurately?
Have a blessed day!
sorry for responding so late, i’m barely on tumblr nowadays!
to be completely honest, ben was the one character that was pretty much fully fleshed out before the idea of a mod ever came up. i don’t know if shiny ever talked about where the soft au ever came from, but way back in the day, me and her were a part of a small friend group we called “church soup” (i don’t know man, weird group chat names yk). we were all fans of fnf and mostly writers/artists, so eventually we made our own aus and would kind of workshop them with each other and role play out a huge group chat between the various versions of the fnf crew. shiny originally helped me out with flower au, she controlled melody. well, after some time she wanted to create her own au, so me and a couple other people helped her develop soft. from the very beginning, she always had the idea of a more “soft” version of boyfriend.
sorry for the long ass backstory but i felt it was important, lol. so, another thing that we would do within these development stages and within the roleplay group chat was basically work thru our own issues. a lot of the people in church soup have been thru a lot, so we would project our issues into our characters as a sort of group therapy and a way to vent. this is where my version of pico came from for flower au, and this is also how ben developed for soft au. i won’t get too much into shinys personal life and traumas as that’s not my place, but she’s been thru a lot, so we suggested venting that out thru ben. a lot of his story has since been changed or at the very least muted, for privacy reasons, but those core values have always stuck. a man who’s been sheltered a majority of his life, with severe parental issues and major anxiety trying his best just to live his own life.
when the soft au eventually became a mod and i joined the team as a writer, ben was always the easiest for me to write because, in a way, he’s just an extension of one of my close friends. he was the first character developed and the one we spent the most time on, so really it became like second nature.
i will say, one of the biggest challenges when writing him for soft mod was the fact that i was writing for an fnf mod. i had a very limited amount of lines to portray the story, and with someone as complicated and ben (and ESPECIALLY grace), it was really hard to make a coherent story with just 15-20 lines of dialogue. from that standpoint, i can understand the criticisms of the mod being kind of all over the place. me and the team talked about letting me write basically “soft mod: the full ass story”, which would go over EVERYTHING. that project eventually got sidelined when the hype of soft mod died down and i got busy with other projects, but hey never say never, i could go back to it one of these days.
when it comes to his mannerisms and a good way to write him, the number one thing i think i could say is, despite a lot of criticism the mod gets, ben isn’t just some uwu soft boy with no spine. it’s important to remember that despite the trauma he’s been thru and the anxiety that plagued him, he truly wants to break free and become his own person. he’s afraid, but he’s pushing thru and standing tall despite that. when we did the rewrite for v2 (or v3 i can’t remember at this point) i tried to portray that side a little bit better.
other traits i think are important to his character include:
- paranoid almost to a fault, sometimes WORSE than toughie, but so distrustful of his own emotions that he stamps that down even if it’s justified
- extreme people pleaser, a habit he continues to try to break
- despite everything, tries his best to find beauty in life. he loves his partner, he loves his cat, he loves to draw and paint and he loves the first snow of winter and the way the birds sing. by the end of the mod, he’s found his strength to continue forward to see the magic in ordinary life things. it’s the main reason he became a painter
sorry this was a LONG response, you’re just the first person to ever ask me directly about being the writer for the mod and i’m a little giddy lol. i hope this helps!!
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