Character Development Prompts and Considerations

While these prompts may contain elements not present in your character's setting, or relevant to your story's plot, being able to put your character in alternate settings or realities is a sign of a well-developed character. If your character cannot survive outside of the setting you have created, it is an indicator that your character has likely not been developed well and may fall flat even in their proper setting.I encourage you to consider these prompts for all essential characters in your stories. Even if the situation or answer will never directly come up in your story, it could still provide you with insight to your character's personality and/or motives. Remember, just because the audience doesn't need to know, doesn't mean the creator doesn't. Visit my new website, characterdevelopmentforwriters.com, for easier navigation of older posts. Consider supporting me on Patreon at patreon.com/characterdevelopmentforwriters.

[characterdevelopmentforwriters]

Hello

I just wanted to let all of you know that characterdevelopmentforwriters.com will only be online for one more year- I am not renewing the subscription. It costs a little under 300$ per year, and I can not justify the expense any longer. Thank you to those who have visited the site, and please know that even if I am not active here on tumblr, this account will not be deleted.

[henlp]

Hello, to whoever you are. I hope a friend sent this to you, or you found this scrolling, or someone reposted the text elsewhere online. Long story short, if you like anime and manga, we need your help. HERE’S WHY WE’RE MOBILIZING.

As many of you may not know, Kadokawa Publishing, one of the oldest and largest publishers of manga in Japan, and owner of a catalog of IP’s that almost certainly includes your favorite publication or show, has recently named a new CEO, Takeshi Natsuno, who has former experience in the early Japanese internet industry and who currently sits on the board of the World Economic Forum. As one of his first acts since being appointed in March, he went on an online livestream and claimed that manga was too risqué for global appeal and that he was open to exploring imposing “new standards” that would bring, in one swoop, roughly 45% of Japan’s manga industry in line with Apple and Google’s capricious content standards that currently control YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Apple’s online platforms, such as Music and Podcasts.

This livestream has Japanese fans hopping mad. They’re organizing to try and stop this policy. But they know they can’t push back alone. In order to push back against Kadokawa, they need help from abroad. That’s where you, dear reader, come in.

We cannot control what Kadokawa does directly. But that doesn’t mean we’re out for the count. Individually, Kadokawa has no incentive to listen to any of us, and their CEO certainly seems not to value the input of fans, anyway. In fact, there isn’t even an option on Kadokawa’s contact page to contact Mr. Natsuno unless you’re a shareholder. But there is an institution Kadokawa will respond to, and that institution is the Diet, Japan’s legislative assembly.

The Diet already knows about this threat. Ken Akamatsu, the famous author of Love Hina, has been warning for years about coming regulatory attempts on the anime industry. A panel of female authors has appeared before the United Nations to rebuff calls to ban certain manga from sale. Sony Interactive, after relocating their headquarters to California, announced a draconian censorship code that has seen the market for indies on PlayStation shrink dramatically as Japanese developers panic. This is a real problem, and it is already taken seriously.

There is national momentum behind enshrining anime and manga as key strategic resources for Japanese soft power. The government is currently converting mangaka residences to museums, adding manga properties to historic registers, and establishing national councils to secure the independence of the medium, including government subsidization of a National Manga Center. The iron is hot, and it’s time to strike.

HERE’S WHAT I WANT YOU TO DO RIGHT NOW. BEFORE YOU CLOSE THIS TAB:

In 2012, Japanese voters in Tokyo elected a politician named Taro Yamada, who campaigned on protecting the freedom of expression of Japanese artists from business and governmental regulation. He also wears a bow tie. In 2019, fed up with increasing demands to censor art and media for the upcoming Olympic Games, a coalition of nerds, otaku and their political allies handed Yamada a massive re-election.

You can send a message to Councillor Yamada right here. (please note that bottom checkmark is a newsletter subscription, you might want to turn that off)

I want you to contact him right now. I want you to write a message, in whatever language you speak, explaining that you are a fan of anime from overseas, and that you want this naked subsumption of Japanese media to speech codes dictated from foreign companies stopped this instant. I want you to tell him that you want to join the fight to keep Japanese media, fair, free and independent. I want you to tell him that Japanese media is at risk of being kneecapped by aggressive foreign tech monopolies, and that this is no longer an issue of simple artistic freedom but of naked economic sabotage against competitors.

I want you to put your heart into whatever you write him, and then I want you to send this link to your friends and have them write him. I want so many foreign pleas for help in Councillor Yamada’s office that he thinks foreign spectators were let in for the Olympics. I want him wading through your pleas. I want him to look at his inbox and go “holy sweet pecan pie” and then I want more on top of that.

Councillor Yamada also works with the Association for Freedom of Entertainment Expression, an artists’ lobby that opposes government censorship in Japan. I want you to send them a message, too, and I want you to explain that the United States, through tech companies, is engaging in soft regulatory suffocation of Japan’s domestic media production.

If you really want to pack a punch, I want you to send Councillor Yamada a letter. Snail mail. Copy-paste his address onto your envelope.

〒100-0014 千代田区永田町2-1-1 参議院議員会館623号室

If you’re still pissed off, you can send foreign messages to Prime Minister Suga’s office, but chances are low this will help much. Suga probably doesn’t care, and he’s also busy with a certain sporting event that has his nation on high alert.

HERE’S WHAT I WANT YOU TO DO IN THE COMING DAYS:

Social media platforms are not your friends. But they’re the best hope we have. I want you to disseminate this call to action. I want you to translate it if you can. Ask your Discord friends to help out. Post it on Twitter. Tag anitubers, anitwitter people, anyone you can think of. Come up with some clever hashtag like #KeepMangaFree, I don’t know; I don’t use Twitter or Discord. Use the #NoNewStandards hashtag. You mobilized to keep the Internet free, now manga needs your help, too. Say it loud, and say it with all the fans in Japan who need your help. Don’t let these companies limit free expression.

Make posts in other communities raising awareness. If you don’t want to be associated with this post, don’t even mention it. Disavow us. We’re just passing the signal, grab and transmit. This has nothing to do with GamerGate or any stupid culture war. This is about keeping a medium we all love independent. Whether you’ve only ever read popular shonen or binge multiple series a week, whether you read official translations or fan scanlations or buy the volumes at the bookstore. Whether you’re an angry weeb, a progressive activist, are apolitical, or anywhere in between. Whether you post on animemes, or goodanimemes, or no meme subs at all. This is bigger than that. No matter what, we need your help.

You totally pirated manga at some point. Don’t lie. Now is your chance to give back. Because if we don’t act soon, the fate of manga may not be pretty.

OG POST LINK, with FAQ. Please, I urge everyone and anyone to do their part, even if it seems like just the bare minimum.

[biologyweeps]

okay here’s the thing:

We don’t know what exactly causes vitiligo. That is, we know that it happens because the body destroys the pigment making cells in the body (melanocytes). It likes being comorbid with other instances of autoimmune fuckery, like Hashimotos because having one auto-immune thing means you’re more likely to have another one.

That can happen for…well, any reason. The immune system likes to freak out about random shit. Stress is one of them!

That does NOT mean that ‘trauma causes vitiligo’ anymore than ‘stress causes lupus’ as much as ‘people predisposed towards certain immune diseases can experience flares or initial onset of the thing from things that upset the immune system.

It can be just stress. It can be trauma, sure. But saying that ‘trauma causes vitiligo’ is VASTLY reductive of the complex relationship between stress and the immune system and its various impacts on the rest of us. (also, fun fact: sometimes people with vitiligo experience spontaneous repigmentation when the body stops being an ass to its own melanocytes.)

Now what really, REALLY gets me is the line about piebaldism. Because that? That’s straight up wrong. We know the inheritance pattern (autosomal dominant, for one, a c-kit mutation on chromosome 4 (here). We have in fact actively selected for in various animals because it occurs naturally in virtually all mammals. It occurs in chimps! It’s just part of the natural variation of pigmentation that happens, into the direction of ‘spot of no pigmentation’.

It has nothing, NOTHING what-so-ever to do with trauma of the mother, unless you’d like to claim that every single piebald-patterend animal out there has had a traumatized mum, and that for the last who-fucking-knows generations back since we started actively breeding for it.

So like, yes absolutely do your research. But like…maybe if you’re doing it, make sure your research is actually y’know TRUE. Instead of claiming that a genetic mutation is ‘Trauma from the mother’.

[crow-queen-art-deactivated20210]

Please share this!!!!! As you resident vitiligan and fellow artist I am here to educate people on how to properly create a character with vitiligo and other things to keep in mind about the disorder.

Only 1% of the entire world’s population has vitiligo but I see so many artists making characters with it when they sometimes don’t even know what vitiligo is and pass it off as “skin pigmentation”. Like— what does that even mean??? XD

It’s not an aesthetic and it won’t get you “diversity points” so stop romanticizing vitiligo!

[characterdevelopmentforwriters]

Has your character ever been quarantined?

[characterdevelopmentforwriters]

Has your character ever gotten a bug stuck in their nose or ear?

[characterdevelopmentforwriters]

Is your character the type to go out of the way of someone else or does your character expect the other to move? 

submitted by @lyonross

[characterdevelopmentforwriters]

Has your character ever seen another planet while looking in the sky?

[characterdevelopmentforwriters]

How easily is your character able to identify stars or constellations?

[characterdevelopmentforwriters]

Would your character prefer the top bunk or the bottom bunk?

[characterdevelopmentforwriters]

Has your character ever had a room all to themselves? (Not just at a time, but all the time and they had a say if anyone else was allowed to enter.)

[characterdevelopmentforwriters]

What type of desk would your character want if they were given the choice? (Ignore cost.)

[characterdevelopmentforwriters]

What is one food your character will never eat under any circumstance?

[characterdevelopmentforwriters]

What is your character's least favorite household chore?

[characterdevelopmentforwriters]

Has your character ever seen a plant that flowered in winter?

[characterdevelopmentforwriters]

Would your character dip their fries or top them?

[characterdevelopmentforwriters]

How many knick-knacks does your character have? >Do any of them have sentimental value?