I love your Honkai Star Rail fics! How do you write Aventurine so well?
i thnk in general writing a character well is a matter of developing this kind of mental library about who they are, their habits, their style and speech and reactions. a sense of how that character moves through space and how they understand and place themselves in relation to the world. if you observe people closely and without trying to better or worsen them, you will note qualities in people that allow you to get a sense of how various character traits fit together. one thing is there; people are contradictory, but characters must have internal consistency.
aventurine is bored of life and thrill-seeking, experience seeking. he has little morality, though he might be kind or generous, hes rarely really Good. he takes a lot of risks, but underneath those risks, he plays it safe. he also is never willing to be vulnerable, and he's really smart about human behavior and other people in general; he can read a room at a glance, figure out what people are trying to say very quickly, calculate odds on the go - street smarts. this may reflect in book smarts, but not necessarily. neither, i think, is he insecure about who he is as a person or the decisions he's made. he's generally confident in them, though he might also be amused by it or find it pathetic or greedy or cold; he sluts it up and uses his body to charm people and is willing to sell himself for cold hard cash and it's not because he doesn't value himself, it's because he exactly has evaluated himself and decided how much he's worth in every situation. he doesn't barter using his own body because he thinks it's all he's worth, or because he hates himself, it's that he has this excessively instrumental view of himself, he doesn't need to hate himself to treat himself callously and with really poor regard for safety and boundaries. this ties back into my earlier point about him being thrill-seeking, he doesn't care about safety for a multitude of reasons, and he doesn't care about boundaries bc no one in his life has ever suggested to him that he should have those. but that doesn't mean he doesn't have limits, just that those limits are highly contextual and whether he conveys them depends on his read of his audience, how they'll respond. aventurine, when he gets pissed at ratio for saying all that shit to him about his parents, would never ever have said it to anyone else, it's just that he knows ratio and knows that if he pushes, ratio might walk it back. that's how aventurine talks; he can accurately predict what the other person will do or say with a narrow margin of error. you see this in every single interaction, down to when he tells jade he bets his life they'll promote him. he even weaponizes his vulnerability, because he knows he appears like a poor little meow meow and can use that to get what he wants. doesn't mean he's never vulnerable, just that he's really difficult about it. because he is, in general, a difficult person.
