Character - Eira Wynn

Okay, so, let me begin by discussing the character who is, arguably, the protagonist of my little adventure - Eira Wynn.

The origin of Eira is actually pretty halfhearted.

The notion for the plot of the story came first- a Frodo Baggins like character failed in his quest to destroy "The Dark Lord" and now, some 800 years later, a new band of heroes must try to depose the triumphant evil, but they are a group who never wanted to be heroes in the first place. I had been rereading Lord of the Rings at the time, and so the notion of the "what if" seemed pretty logical. At some point in the story something had changed and evil had won. Pretty simple, right?

Except that left me with the question of "Who exactly is going to be the person to defeat the Dark Lord this time around?"

Anyone who knows me know that I'm a fan of rogues. I love characters who live in the grey area of morality. Han Solo, Malcolm Reynolds, Batman, Robin Hood, Danny Ocean- these types of people were the best characters to me. They had their own moral compass and society be damned what they thought of it. That meant that whoever took the lead in this story was going to have to be morally grey, and preferably badass.

The night I concocted the idea for the story, the first day of NaNoWriMo mind you, I was actually at an Evanescence concert. Wanting my story to have a darker, slightly goth (but not bleeding black or wearing fetish gear goth) tone, I basically just decided to envision the main character as Amy Lee. Not much of a stretch if you think about it. The anime series Ergo Proxy already had a main character who was the spitting image of Amy Lee and it ended up working pretty well.

Why couldn't I do it?

The initial draft of the character was pretty shallow and fell directly into snarky urban fantasy stereotype number 51. She wore a long black leather coat, she wielded a pair of daggers and she generally walked around like she was the coolest person in the room.

Maybe that would be fine for someone else's story, but the problem for me was that it wasn't allowing me to use character to generate plot. The character had very few issues and little in the way of insecurity. She didn't feel real to me, and because she didn't feel real she just kind of waited for thing to happen.

Quite literally, in the initial draft, I had to hold characters up with a locked door twice, because there was little else in their way to stop them from achieving their goals in a couple of paragraphs.

So, I "called off the jam", as a playwriting professor once put it, and went back to the drawing board. I added new characters and tried scripting her introduction in different ways. But same old Amy Lee- looking Eira just kept persisting. She wasn't growing as a character, despite me figuring out the character ultimate end point, and various things that would happen to her to push her into the direction that the series' end game would need her to so.

But she just kept being an urban fantasy trope. Then I figured out why.

I was writing a world in which the Dark Lord had been ruling for something like 800 years. Humans, elves and dwarves (see I told you you'd see Tolkien) have been forced into gates off sections of the great cities. Yet, there I was writing things as not so bad for these people. They still had comforts, they still had their own apartments. Somehow being crowded into a small section of a huge city wasn't so bad. The character was shaped by that.

Then my mind finally clicked on the analogy of the Jewish Ghetto's from Nazi Occupied Europe.

Suddenly the Eira that refused to die in my mind was forced to yield and adapt to her environment. Suddenly she couldn't be wearing spotless goth-esque attire and gliding through life snarking her way at every step because snarking was easy. This new world demanded an Eira who could still snark, but would snark because it was hard. She lived in a cramped apartment with other people she might not even know, simply because there was no other space.

The other thing that started to develop was a weird sense of optimism in Eira. The world bust kept handing her shit, and she'd just keep pressing forward determined that at some point that turd she was handed would just turn out to be a snickers bar.

Additionally, in changing her environment, the way Eira looked changed. As much as I love Amy Lee, I can't see her looking the way she does tromping around a ghetto. Her hair lightened from black to brown. She became less goth-china-doll, and became more "realistically beautiful". She became someone who would get dirt under her fingernails and not care.

I'm not saying that suddenly Eira became the greatest most memorable character in literature. However the new environment finally made Eira seem to exist as a three dimensional character to me. Her word defined her. A world that was glossed over was a world that created a glossed over character. A world where people had to struggle to live, made Eira someone who had chosen a path because it kept her alive when so many others around here were slowly dying of starvation.

I'm actually curious as to what she'll do now.