Heart characters
Thank you, Ginger, for this week’s WISH question. It’s just lovely. It’s about a “heart character,” one who embodies recurring themes in a gamer’s gaming history.
I think I’m a serial heart-character creator. I typically have one at any given time, but I’ve had more than one over my gaming career. Fechan was certainly a heart character. Juskinah is, right now. Other characters I currently play have pieces, sometimes large pieces, of my heart in them—Afletana, Rat, Shams, the tandem of Aino and Ahti, even throwaway-character Bellis—but a heart character is a heart character and they aren’t heart characters.
So what themes do my heart characters embody? What pieces of my heart do my other characters carry? There’s hope for me yet; the themes have changed over time. I hope they’ll go on changing.
I do doubt I’ll ever have a male heart character, though I’d be pleased to be wrong about that. There’s too much I need to think about and work through (gee, you think?) with regard to being female.
My heart characters—all my best characters, really—are never quite entirely integrated into their surroundings, though they aren’t usually obvious misfits. I designed Juskinah to be such a misfit, actually, but she is now an assimilated citizen of her new land and a shaikh’s adopted daughter. Afletana is an implacably proper well-born lady and a priestess. Even guttersnipe Rat had carved out a place in the street world before she joined the party.
Curiously, I can’t play a completely in-tune-with-environs character. I’ve tried, now and then. The result is invariably flat. My Vampire character, Magdalena of clan Gangrel, was pretty, ordinary, passive, status-quo—and boring as all hell. (No fault to the game, which was great; Magdalena just wasn’t a compelling character.) Even Bellis, designed to be lawful (and, yes, played that way), is an ex-monk. Naturally she left because she felt confined. Naturally. Sometimes I’m so transparent I astonish even myself.
If they aren’t total misfits, my heart characters aren’t fight-the-power revolutionaries, either, probably to their discredit. Fechan went for psionics training (more munchkinism on the part of the GM), and thought the fortress where she trained and its sexist, racist, classist, rigidly hierarchical occupants utterly loathsome—but she did not struggle against them except to retain her own identity. (I wish I were kidding about the psionicists, one of whom was probably a heart-character for the GM, but I’m not. They were truly vile.)
Still, these characters look about them and they question. Sometimes the questioning is silent, sometimes overt. They do not like to be caged, ordered around, made to do what goes against their senses of ethics or pragmatism (and they are quite pragmatic). They are self-effacing, accepting, followers rather than leaders when fate allows it—but they transgress when they must. They know they’re transgressing (as if anyone would let them forget it!) and they accept the consequences. Ungracefully, at times.
Insanity, pain, scarring—these come up a lot, and I once thought they were themes. Typical angsty tripe, I thought. I know better now. The theme is recovery. The theme is resilience.
My heart-characters have been hurt, terribly so, but not broken; their journey during the game is toward wholeness, health, integrity. They may fall ill, be hurt, make mistakes, backslide, lose their way, lose their minds—they may even run up against something too much for them and die—but their faces are toward the sunrise. They do not want to be broken, spend the rest of their lives doing nothing but contemplating their hurt.
They will also go to the wall for a loved one, no matter the cost. How they find such intimates is an open question. Fechan had no family; Juskinah is adopted. Fechan turned down marriage, but had close friends; Juskinah and Shams are embarking on a tentative, questing romance. Doesn’t matter how the tie forms, really. If a true friend, a lover, or another loved one is in jeopardy, my heart-characters drop everything to help.
Juskinah features a new theme: finding and losing a mentor. No secret how this theme arose; I am curious to see what will come of it. Rat embodies this also, right down to the recent loss, which she is not handling well at the moment.
I notice that I am also creating a number of older characters, middle-aged and on up. Nur bint Leila, in Juskinah’s campaign, is one, and I drew up a recent widow for a play-by-email Al-Qadim campaign. I don’t know that aging is quite a heart-character theme yet, but I don’t doubt it will someday become one.
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