not!meme~

[so-saturnalian.livejournal.com]

Because I wondered this sometime yesterday night and it's been a not!meme idea ever since:

Why do you play the character(s) you play? Did you pick them up on a whim, is there anything in particular about their personality you love? Or are you just good at them and decided to run with it?

Comments

Teel Dears!

[shockheadedpete.livejournal.com]

I have no idea.

I first picked up Top 10, because I had the same haircut as Robyn Slinger at the time, and I thought she looked cool, but during my first read of the series my favorite character was Kemlo Caesar, a talking dog in a cybersuit. I read the series as trades, and for some reason it was very difficult to get volume two at the time (I think it had just come out, and I had to order the hard cover at great expense from Amazon). While I was waiting, I read volume one (which is issues 1 through 7) over a few times, and somewhere in there I fell in love with Pete.

Pete is a very dividing character among fans of the series. You can tell from the letters to the editor in the backs of the issues and in reviews of the series. People either really identify with him, or find him completely repulsive. I won't go into the psychology behind that, but let's just say I find it...telling. What I have always loved the most about Pete is that he is a very very human superhuman. He is, let's face it, the kind of superhero most people would actually be: horribly flawed, but no necessarily a bad person.

I've been roleplaying for years (you can see my character list at iplayedthem), and I've always mentioned the Top 10 series in "why doesn't anyone play these characters?" memes, but I'd never played in a setting that I thought Pete would fit. I started off playing in third person "trapped on a" type games, and I'm not sure if people notice, but I find Pete very difficult to write in the third person (see: I don't log much). There are characters I can write in the third person without thinking about it; fanfics on them just spew out of me like someone else is writing them and I'm just channeling it, but Pete has never been like that. I switched for a while to prompt-based games, and it's just too big of a suspension of disbelief to think that Pete would keep a diary, much less an online diary. I had a bad experience with a character in one of those games, and jumped ships for the unmoderated waters of sixwordstories, where I played for about three years.

When the second season of Top 10 came out, and had such a strong storyline attached to Pete, I knew it was time to write him. I started him at sws, and actually attracted a few castmates, but never felt fullfilled: I wanted a more structured universe to play him in, so I searched for superhero-based games, with lots of robots in them that he could butt up against, and here I am!