Do you make your characters like you?

[Killer Queen]

I do a mix of making my character like me and what I'd like to be


not saying I don't like who I am, but I'm 100% I'd be 200% happier if I was a well-endowed cyborg living in a cyberpunk world

 

[torenia]

Yes and no. Usually, in creating a character, I give them some aspect of myself. I take one little piece of my personality and insert it into the character. However, I then build a unique personality for the character. So, if I give a character a bit of my friendliness, I might make the character friendly for different reasons, or maybe extremely outgoing.
I always give my characters one of my likes and/or dislikes in addition to their own. It's just a fun little thing I do, and sometimes I make it a game. "Find the piece of me in this character."


But my characters are their own people too. I almost never have anything in common with the history of the characters, mostly because I don't want to rp my own life. I write to create a different world, so having that world be the same as the real one would just be boring. My characters, though having pieces of my personality, have their own personalities and do things I would probably never do.


I suppose you could compare my characters to mosaics. I put a fragment from the same pot into each mosaic, but use fragments from many other pots to create the rest of the mosaic.

this is completely my process!! if they do have a personality trait like mine, i try to make it stem from a different source.


my most interesting characters tend to be the most normal. creating a normal character with limited quirks that still happens to be engaging enough for character interaction is more difficult than you would think. for this reason, when i succeed in creating a normal character, that normal character is a very distant comparison from myself because i really don't present as someone who can easily blend into the crowds. LOL

 

[Kai Mi]

I believe when it is said that you write a bit of yourself into each character its true! Most, if not all, of my characters over the years have some sort of personal quirk or philosophy to them. I try not to make them too much like myself however, it makes it feel somewhat surreal if I do. I've heard the phrase "Familiarity breeds contempt" which s actually fairly fitting for these types of characters. Also, I deal in the genre of Fantasy a majority of the time as a step back from reality.


On the other hand one of my favorite characters I ended up making turned out a lot like me when it comes to personality and ideology but still retains who they were before this discovery and its so much fun to portray them.


A lot more recently I have begun to create characters of totally conflicting roles then myself simply to try to step out of my comfort zone. Most any way you do it is a lot of fun actually; to each his own!

 

[Oapboap]

I'm going firmly with "It depends". There's lots of variables at play here.


If I'm playing a canon character, then, obviously, there can't be much of me in them. Though I'll definitely find some part of those characters that match parts of me, and dial them up for the character. I mean Future Trunks can't snap his fingers and become a pacifist because I don't like fighting IRL, fighting's what he does. But the character is well-mannered, and I'll dial it up a little higher. Example, he won't train with his close human friends because he could easily physically hurt or kill them.


With my original characters, though, yeah. There's some of me in them, usually in the personality department. Just in a very different place and situation that I would ever be in; getting me out of the happy comfortable world that is my life. Kind of like the old TV show Quantum Leap, jump into a different body at a different time and place and adapt to the story. But, they're never just "me in this unrealistic scene": they have their own lives, wants, fears, dreams, etc--just some happen to coincide with my own at different times.